[question] transitive tool requirements set on profile file

[Alexolut]

My project uses several dependencies that ask for build tools like meson, pkgconf and ninja. I would like to have all these tool packages inside my artifactory repository. I put them as meson/1.4.0@my/stable, pkgconf/2.1.0@my/stable and ninja/1.12.1@my/stable.

I add tools into my conan profile in this way:

[tool_requires]
ninja/1.12.1@my/stable
meson/1.4.0@my/stable
pkgconf/2.1.0@my/stable

But on build stage I got an error:

meson/1.4.0@my/stable: Downloaded recipe revision 0
ERROR: Version range '>=1.10.2 <2' from requirement 'ninja/[>=1.10.2 <2]' required by 'meson/1.4.0@my/stable' could not be resolved in local cache

I even tried to specify dependencies between tools like the following, but with no luck:

[tool_requires]
ninja/1.12.1@my/stable
meson*: ninja/*@my/stable
meson/1.4.0@my/stable
pkgconf*: meson/*@my/stable
pkgconf/2.1.0@my/stable

In the latter case I got this error:

ERROR: Conflict in meson/1.4.0@my/stable:
    'meson/1.4.0@my/stable' requires 'ninja/1.12.1@my/stable' while 'meson/1.4.0@my/stable' requires 'ninja/1.12.1'.
    To fix this conflict you need to override the package 'ninja' in your root package.

How can I fix that issue with dependencies between tools staying entirely inside @my/stable path without editing tools recipes?

I have conan 1.65 only.

[memsharded]

Hi @Alexolut

Thanks for your question

meson/1.4.0@my/stable: Downloaded recipe revision 0

This means that you are using Conan 1 with revisions disabled. This would be quite discouraged, revisions have been in Conan 1 for many years, and they are very recommended. Conan 2 uses always revisions enabled.

Then the main problem seem to be:

ninja/[>=1.10.2 <2]

The meson recipe seems to be requiring ninja/[>=1.10.2 <2]. But based on your profile, you might have created ninja/1.12.1@my/stable instead. Those are different packages if using different user/channel. You might need to align both.

Our recommendation is, for ConanCenter-like packages, that is third-parties open-source built from ConanCenter recipes (conan-center-index github repo), the best is to keep them without user/channel. See recommendations in https://docs.conan.io/2/devops/conancenter/hosting_binaries.html

Please try that and let us know if this helps.

[Alexolut]

Thank you for the link to recommended approach. I will definitely try this later, but for now am I understand you correctly, that there is no way to override "ninja" requirements from meson by specifying [tool_requires] in profile file?

Will enabling revisions allow me to achieve what I want without modifying the recipe?

[memsharded]

The problem is that meson doesn't have a tool_requires to ninja, see https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/addbdbcbb17cfdf542b48c742d720413636d5884/recipes/meson/all/conanfile.py#L29.

This is not great, because ninja might not be strictly necessary for meson, but it is something that the consumer defines. Furthermore, being a requires of a tool_requires, makes it not overrideable with [tool_requires] as it is not a tool-requires per se.

It is possible in Conan 2 to define the [replace_requires] section in the build profile, as it applies to the build context, but this doesn't exist in Conan 1.