Debug/Release (Windows)

[ghost]

Hello,

I've had a problem which I have not paid much attention to up to now. On Windows, I am always building the Release configuration of projects. If we want to use different dependencies between release and debug builds how can we do it with a simple conanfile.txt? I've noticed that I am always downloading the release version of my dependencies when I write a conanfile.txt and then execute "conan install". Also, is there a way to have conan & cmake link to a different build of a conan package (Debug or Release) depending on the Debug/Release configuration selection in Visual Studio?

Thanks!

[memsharded]

A simple conanfile.txt wouldn't allow conditional dependencies. There are a couple of approaches:

• Write 2 (or more conanfile.txt, name them conanfile_release.txt, for example). Use the filename option for conan install to invoke one or the other conanfile.txt. If the dependencies are the same, just use the -s build_type=Debug command line parameter
• Use a conanfile.py instead. Not necessary to define name, version, package(), package_info()... as you are not creating a package, just consuming. Use the configure() or the requirements() methods to define your conditional logic for dependencies based on self.settings.build_type

No, there is no way to select debug/release dependencies when switching from visual studio, because of the way and relationship that visual studio has with cmake. Just go to the command line and switch the build_type, as dependencies are cached, it will be instantaneous. Also, if you want you can create packages both for Release/Debug configurations, but this is not what package creators are typically doing. I recommend switching in the command line, for me is an operation equivalent to switching branches from git.

[ghost]

That's solid advice thanks! I know that the VS-cmake combo is a bit rigid with regard to this and I was thinking along these lines (not in such detail of course), but I wanted to ask you in case I had missed some detail.

It might be good to mention something about this in the documentation at some point. I don't know if it's there somewhere but I couldn't find anything when I looked. VS users are very used to switching between Release and Build configurations via a simple drop-down so, when something crashes (which can happen with some statically linked libraries) they might get the idea that it's because of conan.