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Ports Overlay (Jun 19, 2019)

Note: this is the feature as it was initially specified and does not necessarily reflect the current behavior.

1. Motivation

A. Allow users to override ports with alternate versions

It's a common scenario for vcpkg users to keep specific versions of libraries to use in their own projects. The current recommendation for users is to fork vcpkg's repository and create tags for commits containing the specific versions of the ports they want to use.

This proposal adds an alternative to solve this problem. By allowing vcpkg users to specify additional locations in their file system containing ports for:

  • older or newer versions of libraries,
  • modified libraries, or
  • libraries not available in vcpkg.

These locations will be searched when resolving port names during package installation, and override ports in <vcpkg-root>/ports.

B. Allow users to keep unmodified upstream ports

Users will be able to keep unmodified versions of the ports shipped with vcpkg and update them via vcpkg update and vcpkg upgrade without having to solve merge conflicts.

2. Other design concerns

  • Allow a set of vcpkg commands to optionally accept additional paths to be used when searching for ports.
  • Additional paths must take precedence when resolving names of ports to install.
  • Allow users to specify multiple additional paths.
  • Provide a simple disambiguation mechanism to resolve ambiguous port names.
  • After resolving a port name, the installation process has to work the same as for ports shipped by vcpkg.
  • This DOES NOT ENABLE MULTIPLE VERSIONS of a same library to be INSTALLED SIDE-BY-SIDE.

3. Proposed solution

This document proposes allowing additional locations to search for ports during package installation that will override and complement the set of ports provided by vcpkg (ports under the <vcpkg_root>/ports directory).`

A new option --overlay-ports will be added to the vcpkg install, vcpkg update, vcpkg upgrade, vcpkg export, and vcpkg depend-info commands to specify additional paths containing ports.

From a user experience perspective, a user expresses interest in adding additional lookup locations by passing the --overlay-ports option followed by a path to:

  • an individual port (directory containing a CONTROL file),

    • vcpkg install sqlite3 --overlay-ports="C:\custom-ports\sqlite3"

  • a directory containing ports,

    • vcpkg install sqlite3 --overlay-ports=\\share\org\custom-ports

  • a file listing paths to the former two.

    NOTE: Reading paths from a text file is not available in the current implementation, some revisions to this part of the specification are being made and will be implemented in a future date.

    • vcpkg install sqlite3 --overlay-ports=..\port-repos.txt

      port-repos.txt

      .\experimental-ports\sqlite3
C:\custom-ports
\\share\team\custom-ports
\\share\org\custom-ports

      Relative paths inside this file are resolved relatively to the file's location. In this case a experimental-ports directory should exist at the same level as the port-repos.txt file.

NOTE: It is not the goal of this document to discuss library versioning or project dependency management solutions, which require the ability to install multiple versions of a same library side-by-side.

Multiple additional paths

Users can provide multiple additional paths by repeating the --overlay-ports option.

vcpkg install sqlite3 
    --overlay-ports="..\experimental-ports\sqlite3" 
    --overlay-ports="C:\custom-ports" 
    --overlay-ports="\\share\team\custom-ports

Overlaying ports

Port name resolution follows the order in which additional paths are specified, with the first match being selected for installation, and falling back to <vcpkg-root>/ports if the port is not found in any of the additional paths.

No effort is made to compare version numbers inside the CONTROL files, or to determine which port contains newer or older files.

Examples

Given the following directory structure:

team-ports/
|-- sqlite3/
|---- CONTROL
|-- rapidjson/
|---- CONTROL
|-- curl/
|---- CONTROL

my-ports/
|-- sqlite3/
|---- CONTROL
|-- rapidjson/
|---- CONTROL

vcpkg
|-- ports/
|---- <upstream ports>
|-- vcpkg.exe
|-- preferred-ports.txt

  • Example #1:

    Running:

    vcpkg/vcpkg.exe install sqlite3 --overlay-ports=my-ports --overlay-ports=team-ports

    Results in my-ports/sqlite3 getting installed as that location appears first in the command line arguments.

  • Example #2:

    A specific version of a port can be given priority by adding its path first in the list of arguments:

    vcpkg/vcpkg.exe install sqlite3 rapidjson curl 
    --overlay-ports=my-ports/rapidjson 
    --overlay-ports=vcpkg/ports/curl
    --overlay-ports=team-ports

    Installs:

    • sqlite3 from team-ports/sqlite3
    • rapidjson from my-ports/rapidjson
    • curl from vcpkg/ports/curl

  • Example #3:

    NOTE: Reading paths from a text file is not available in the current implementation, some revisions to this part of the specification are being made and will be implemented in a future date.

    Given the content of preferred-ports.txt as:

    ./ports/curl
/my-ports/rapidjson
/team-ports

    A location can be appended or prepended to those included in preferred-ports.txt via the command line, like this:

    vcpkg/vcpkg.exe install sqlite3 curl --overlay-ports=my-ports --overlay-ports=vcpkg/preferred-ports.txt

    Which results in my-ports/sqlite3 and vcpkg/ports/curl getting installed.

4. Proposed User experience

i. User wants to preserve an older version of a port

Developer Alice and her team use vcpkg to acquire OpenCV and some other packages. She has even contributed many patches to add features to the OpenCV 3 port in vcpkg. But, one day, she notices that a PR to update OpenCV to the next major version has been merged.

Alice wants to update some packages available in vcpkg. Unfortunately, updating her project to use the latest OpenCV is not immediately possible.

Alice creates a private GitHub repository and checks in the set of ports that she wants to preserve. Then provides her teammates with the link to clone her private ports repository.

mkdir vcpkg-custom-ports
cd vcpkg-custom-ports
git init 
cp -r %VCPKG_ROOT%/ports/opencv .
git add .
git commit -m "[opencv] Add OpenCV 3 port"
git remote add origin https://github.com/<Alice's GitHub username>/vcpkg-custom-ports.git
git push -u origin master

Now her team is able to use:

git clone https://github.com/<Alice's GitHub username>/vcpkg-custom-ports.git
vcpkg update --overlay-ports=./vcpkg-custom-ports
vcpkg upgrade --no-dry-run --overlay-ports=./vcpkg-custom-ports

to upgrade their packages and preserve the old version of OpenCV they require.