There's nothing wrong in assuming that the user has certain tools installed.
Let's say you are developing libfoo which depends on libbar and you want to make it as easy as possible for your users to install libfoo.
With a package manager
If libfoo and libbar are available via the same package manager all your users have to do is:
vcpkg install libbar libfoo
You don't have to do anything special in libfoo for this, just instruct the user to install all dependencies in your readme.
It doesn't really matter what package manager is used.
Without a package manager
You will still want to make it easy for people to build and install your project directly. It may seem that invoking a package manager during the build or configuration phase of your project and solving all dependencies is user friendly because the user no longer has to deal with installing those, but it isn't for a number of reasons, including:
- you or someone else may want to add your project to another package manager (like conan, spack, etc)
- someone may want to consume
libfoo with FetchContent, CPM, directly with add_subdirectory, etc
- someone may not be a user of vcpkg - there's no need to force them to use it, if possible
- you may want to add another dependency,
libbaz, which is not available on vcpkg
- a user may have the right version of
libbar already installed (not necessarily through vcpkg)
This list is not exhaustive. If you're not writing a library some points don't really apply.
This means that someone who has all the dependencies already installed should be able to use libfoo like this:
git clone your-repo
cd your-repo
cmake -Bbuild
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
Resolving dependencies without a package manager
However, it may be desirable to solve dependencies automatically. If your dependencies are using CMake the easiest way of doing this is with FetchContent. For some of the reasons outlined above you should provide an escape hatch so people can still use the already installed dependencies. This can be done with an option. For example, something like FOO_USE_EXTERNAL_BAR. This can be set either to yes or no by default, there's no right answer. As long as the user can control this I don't think it matters that much. You should namespace your options to avoid possible conflicts with options used by other projects.
In this case your build script could do this:
if (FOO_USE_EXTERNAL_BAR)
find_package(bar REQUIRED)
else ()
FetchContent_Declare(
bar
GIT_REPOSITORY bar-repo
GIT_TAG release-tag
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(bar)
endif ()
target_link_libraries(foo PRIVATE bar::bar)
Depending on how libbar's CMakeLists.txt is written and organized the if and else branches may get more complicated. See Effective CMake for some details and tips.
Now I can either let libfoo resolve the libbar by setting FOO_USE_EXTERNAL_BAR to ON when I configure your project, or I can set it to OFF to have more control over how it is resolved. I may even use libfoo as a dependency for a project that already depends on libbar. If you always pull it in I can't avoid conflicts in this case.
Using CMake to update dependencies
You may still find it easy for you to be able to update all the project's dependencies using CMake without downloading them via FetchContent. While this will probably raise some eyebrows you could add a custom target for solving dependencies with a package manager. This should also be controllable by an option. Unlike in the above case I strongly believe that if you do this the option should be set to off by default:
if (FOO_AUTO_USE_VCPKG)
add_custom_target(
update_deps
COMMAND vcpkg install libbar
)
add_dependencies(foo update_deps)
endif ()
This will invoke vcpkg every time you build foo so it will make your builds slower. If you remove the add_dependencies call you would have to manually run the update_deps target whenever you need to (which shouldn't be that often anyway).
Notes
Using options is a great way of providing options to your users. It should be noted that they increase the cognitive load, so picking strong defaults can help with that.
FetchContent is a nice way of taking the care away from the user, but at the same time multiple projects that use it will end up re-downloading the same libraries over and over again. It is still more user friendly than invoking a package manager at build time and as long as the users can disable this behavior there's nothing to worry about.
Some parts of this answer may be regarded more as opinion and less as facts. As I said, there is no one right way of doing this, different people will have different ways of solving this problem. Different projects and different environments will have different constraints.
I already recommended the Effective CMake talk above, other useful recourses are available here. If you're a library author you may also want to take a look at Deep CMake for Library Authors.
