In the realm of software development, managing libraries in precompiled binary format is non-trivial. Java jars and .NET nupkgs have a fair bit of flexibility and customizability, and with flexibility comes complexity. However, the complexity surrounding these intermediate binaries pales in comparison to that surrounding precompiled native binaries. This complexity is so overwhelming, that historically it was considered impossible or at least impractical by most. This post highlights a few of the dimensions of complexity which exist when packaging native binaries, and explains the modern and innovative approach used by Conan.io to address them. While this post is focused on C++ as a use-case, much of it applies to other native languages as well, including Rust, Go, D, and so on.

Continue reading Packaging Native Binaries

With the latest version of Conan, Bincrafters had to re-think our common workflows for developing packages. We were a bit confused at first, and had to ask the Conan team for advice to get things streamlined. We wanted to share the current workflow with the community in case other packagers are also struggling to figure out the best flow with the updated command-line options.

Continue reading Updated Conan Package Flow

The Bincrafters team recently hit double digits, which feels like a big accomplishment for us. Each member has brought a unique combination of experience, insight, and Conan recipe’s to the table. This has allowed us to start checking multiple packages off our list each week for the last two months. It’s also allowed us to level-up our packaging game in a few cases. This post is just to highlight how valuable and appreciated everyone’s time is, before we start on a next trial of strength… packaging Qt.

Continue reading Bincrafters Shoutouts

We’ve received a lot of really great feedback from the C++ community about the Conan packages we’ve been publishing over the past few months. We are really grateful to the community and the Conan team for the support, and we had a few other updates we wanted to share.

Continue reading Bincrafters Status Update

Bincrafters has now published a Conan package for IBM’s open-source libraries known as “ICU” to our public Conan repository on Bintray. ICU stands for “International Components for Unicode” and is a mature and portable set of libraries for software internationalization (I18N) and globalization (G11N) which implement the Unicode Standard, giving applications the same results on all platforms.

Continue reading Conan Package - IBM ICU