Depper Dan

Windows Library Builds made easi(er)

About

Depper Dan is a collection of scripts to enable (CMake based) C++ projects with a set of open source dependencies to build them automatically.

Motivation

Unlike Linuxoid systems, C++ projects that use Open Source dependencies traditionally have a hard time building those dependencies, especially automatic, with custom build settings or when they depend on one another.

This script realizes this in a re-usable and extendable manner but only for a limited set of libraries. It is meant to be used with Visual Studio 2022 for build tools and modern CMake.

Usage

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio (2022 was what this was developed for but others might work)
• git (available in the Path)
• CMake (available in the Path)
• Python (3.11, 3.12, etc)
• This repository, checked out and with temporary disk space

Available packages

Each package that can be built with this system must be given in packages.jon. For every package therein, you will find a build script in the folder build_functions.

Build

To use the system, you must specify an installation folder. It should have as short a name as possible (on windows) to avoid MAX_PATH issues which may arise out of any build. In the examples below we will use C:\devel\3rd_party. This directory will be used to install each package built with Depper Dan and it should be considered stable and system wide.

As a shell, use "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt" to ensure the correct build tools and environment being set.

Create a venv unless it's already present and activate it

> cd /depper/dan/repo
> python -m venv .venv
> .venv\Scripts\Activate
> pip install -r requirements.txt

Build a single package into your installation dir

> python .\depper_dan.py -i C:\devel\3rd_party -p zlib

Extension

This script is meant to be hacked on. It is not meant to be a complete extensible package manager like conan or vcpkg.

Extending it by more packages generally involves:

• Add package information in packages.jon.
• Add a build function in build_functions.

License

Depper Dan is being published under the Apache License 2.0