Conan 1.30 has been released. This release moves forward on several integrations including GCC, Intel compiler, and MSBuild. It brings some more maturity around components, and adds a new way to use custom generators. Also, macOS 11 (aka “Big Sur”) has now been added to Conan’s default settings.

Improved libcxx detection for GCC

When Conan is installed, it autodetects a number of settings based on the environment. Among those settings are compiler and compiler.version. When the compiler is gcc, it also detects compiler.libcxx which has had some challenging corner cases for a while. This release adds robustness to the libcxx detection which hopefully will result in better defaults for those corner cases when Conan is installed.

Note: If we enabled this behavior by default, it could be considered a breaking change, so we had to leave it off by default and users must set the CONAN_V2_MODE environment variable to turn it on.

Experimental tools for intel compiler support

Conan’s tools module provides conanfile.py authors with a number of helper functions to reduce boilerplate code in recipes and avoid common errors. Three new functions have now been exposed for when recipes need special handling to work with the Intel compiler:

  • tools.intel_installation_path()
  • tools.intel_compilervars()
  • tools.intel_compilervars_dict()

Experimental Toolchain for MSBuild

Continuing our work on Conan’s new toolchain strategy, this release contains a toolchain class for the MSBuild build system. Like the existing CMake and Make toolchains which have been added previously, this new toolchain class generates .props files which contain all the relevant build-related variables from Conan. These .props files do NOT include variables related to dependencies. Dependency-related information should still be generated by the msbuild generator.

New self.cpp_info.requires attribute

We have also continued to evolve and improve the experience around the components feature. A common case that has come up is that many packages which declare components are depended upon by downstream packages which do not declare components. Previously, when the downstream package only depends upon specific components of the upstream package, it could not model that in it’s own cpp_info. This meant that all transitive consumers would end up depending on all components of the original upstream.

This is a tricky problem to describe without an example, so here is the example of the package_info method from the OpenSSL recipe, and one from a consumer of OpenSSL.

# Conanfile for OpenSSL:

def package_info(self):
    self.cpp_info.name = "OpenSSL"
    self.cpp_info.components["crypto"].names["cmake_find_package"] = "Crypto"
    self.cpp_info.components["crypto"].libs = ["libcrypto"]
    self.cpp_info.components["crypto"].defines = ["DEFINE_CRYPTO=1"]
    self.cpp_info.components["crypto"].requires = ["zlib::zlib"]

    self.cpp_info.components["ssl"].names["cmake"] = "SSL"
    self.cpp_info.components["ssl"].includedirs = ["include/headers_ssl"]
    self.cpp_info.components["ssl"].libs = ["libssl"]

# Conanfile for consumer of OpenSSL:

def package_info(self):
    self.cpp_info.requires = ['openssl::ssl']
    # Depends only on ssl component
    # Which notably does NOT depend on zlib
    # ...

OpenSSL declares two components: ssl and crypto. The consumer package only needs one of them (ssl). With the new cpp_info.requires attribute, the consumer can properly declare that dependency. The result is that this consumer, and all future downstream consumers of it will only link with the ssl component of the OpenSSL package and not libcrypto nor zlib.

Other notable changes

The Qbs generator received a significant update which makes it properly model transitive dependencies using the native dependency declaration syntax. This cuts down on clutter and should enforce linker order properly. The JSON and Markdown generators both learned how to include the cpp_info.names and cpp_info.filenames attributes.


Besides the items listed above, there were some minor bug fixes you may wish to read about. If so, please refer to the changelog for the complete list.

We hope you enjoy this release, and look forward to your feedback.