Recent updates in Conan package manager support

In our previous blog post about Installing Qt via Conan Package Manager, we introduced how to use Conan package manager with Qt. Now it's time to look at the recent enhancements in our Conan story. 

Along with Qt 6, we have provided more flexibility via leveraging a package manager in addition to Qt Online Installer. The new package manager functionality, based on conan.io (https://conan.io), allows providing more packages to the users without increasing the complexity of the baseline Qt. In addition to the packages provided by Qt, the package manager can be used for getting content from other sources. 

Qt 6.2.3 packages are now available via Conan. Packages are built as an integral part of the Qt CI system, where we integrate and test all our supported build configurations and platforms. 

We plan to have the relevant 3rd party components available among our Conan packages as well. This will guarantee that the Qt-compatible version is always available and makes it more straightforward to build libraries, dependent on the 3rd party library. The ICU (International Components for Unicode) is now available along with Qt 6.2.3. 

The cross-platform support has been improved. In addition to desktop platforms, packages are now available for both mobile platforms iOS and Android. In addition, builds for the Qt for WebAssembly and windows_arm64 are available. 

Outline

The next steps will be to distribute commercial-only components, such as Application Manager and Interface Manager via Conan. 

The support for embedded platforms will be improved as well. While you still build Qt for embedded targets with Yocto, you may use Conan to build and deploy packages for the Yocto-built image, running in the target device. Currently, only the Raspberry Boot2Qt image, but support for other targets will become available in the future.

We are also working with the plan to have a GUI for the Conan client and how the Qt installers could be used to install Conan packages under the hood. The plans are very preliminary and all ideas around this will be highly appreciated.  

Please try it out 

Now we are in the technology preview state and we hope to get a lot of feedback to make Conan a first-class citizen in Qt. So please let us know your thoughts in this blog post comments or Jira. Please use the component Conan in your bug report to allow easy filtering. 

Please fill in a mini-survey as well and tell us, what you think about Conan and your Conan needs shortly.