vcpkg support

[webfolderio]

Hi,

Do you consider to support vcpkg?

[d-frey]

We (Colin and me) are not using Windows, hence we usually don't support it directly from our side. Someone (@uilianries / @wravery ?) needs to send a PR to them. I'm not sure if this is reasonable pre-1.0.0, but large parts seem quite stable so it could make sense.

[uilianries]

Since VCPKG is a Conan's rival I can't help with it 😂 Joking ...

I don't have experience packaging projects for vcpkg, but I think it's a good idea, as it is very popular and it will help to distribute this project over Windows.

@webfolderio Do you know how to create a package there? If not, I would like to try, to understand the packaging process.

[wravery]

@uilianries If you have vcpkg installed/bootstrapped, you can start a new package with vcpkg create <package> <archive URL>. Once the package is initialized, you can open its files with vcpkg edit <package>, which will launch whatever editor you have in the EDITOR environment variable (or fall back to VS Code if it can find it).

It starts with a path/URL to an archive file rather than a GitHub repo/commit, but you can replace the vcpkg_download_distfile call in portfile.cmake with a call to vcpkg_from_github, e.g.

vcpkg_from_github(
    OUT_SOURCE_PATH SOURCE_PATH
    REPO taocpp/pegtl
    REF c5d158ffab4baa0e1c3f6d54c0684f05a2412f74
    SHA512 efd5d36ca14c27948005cd034e72e24855f6046141c316a1d4b7186af9753fd035dab8303dc86e2f2de1b185f5fa3f5d678672892b1fc4ab69e827492a94e897
    HEAD_REF master
)

BTW, that's from the 3.0.0-pre update for pegtl I recently landed (with 2.8.0 moved to pegtl-2). Vcpkg cares about the version in the CONTROL file being a string match rather than doing a semver comparison to decide whether or not a package is upgradeable. So adding a -pre suffix is good enough to distinguish it from an eventual 1.0.0 release. Similarly, if you want to rev the package without changing the version string number, the convention is to just add -*, e.g. -1, -2, etc.

[wravery]

Once you have a draft of the package's CONTROL file and portfile.cmake, running vcpkg build <package> will attempt to build it without actually installing it. Header-only libraries with pre-existing CMake build systems are pretty quick and easy, but if it encounters errors in the CMake config or the build/install step it should give you error messages pointing to log files in the build tree. Then you just iterate until it builds clean.

Oh, and since it includes the SHA512 hash of the commit, I usually find that when I want to rev the REF I have to build it once and fail to get the error message with the actual hash, then paste that in and proceed to build the updated package.

[uilianries]

@wravery Thanks for your excellent explanation!

[webfolderio]

Fixed by @myd7349

microsoft/vcpkg#6253

[ColinH]

Thanks!

[uilianries]

Amazing!