Building eCAL with Conan dependencies

Important

As eCAL uses the CMakeDeps generator, unfortunately a rather old Conan version (1.41.0) has to be used at the moment, because internal Conan behavior was changed after that version and not all recipes on CCI yet support CMakeDeps generator. The release of a new markupsafe package has broken the API and breaks older Jinja2 versions which Conan 1.41.0 uses.

Hence the Conan build of eCAL may not be functional at this point of time.

Conan is a dependency manager, that has a wide range of precompiled open source libraries available. Building eCAL with Conan dependencies is mainly a shortcut for Windows users developing eCAL who do not want to build all dependencies from source. It lets a developer get up to speed very quickly. We certainly do not recommend to build eCAL installers from Conan dependencies at this point.

The Conan build has been tested for VS2019 only, and dependencies might not be aligned with the version included as submodules.

Build instructions

To build with Conan you need to have a Conan installation. It’s best to install Conan inside a virtual environment:

# Create virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
# Windows
.venv\Scripts\activate.bat|ps1
# Linux
source .venv\bin\activate
# Install Conan
pip install conan==1.41.0

You need to set up a Conan profile to match your development. For reference, see https://docs.conan.io/en/latest/reference/profiles.html.

First, let Conan install all dependencies, as specified in conanfile.py:

mdkir _build
cd _build
conan install .. --profile <your-profile> --build missing

eCAL uses the WinExtras module from Qt, which is why, unfortunately, there are no prebuilt QT libraries. This is why we need to build Qt from source and thus pass a --build missing when running conan install. Conan will create a lot of files in the build folder. Some are CMake scripts to locate dependencies, others are scripts to use / activate special environments to allow you to build / debug eCAL in a way that all libraries can be located at runtime. Thus, we recommend to build eCAL with the following commands:

activate.bat|ps1|sh
mkdir _cmake
cd _cmake
cmake ../.. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE:FILEPATH=../conan_toolchain.cmake
cmake --build .

Alternatively, if you can also open the generated Visual Studio solution when working on Windows, and build / debug from within Visual Studio.:

Beware, that depending on the settings in your Conan profile, the build supports either Debug or Release builds. Make sure, when building from Visual Studio, to build the appropriate configuration. If you have a Release Conan profile, but try to build for the Debug configuration from Visual Studio, you will receive build errors.