Can we use qmp to control local dependencies, like maven?

[emersonsiega]

Hi, we have a proprietary software that integrates many other smaller projects. We want to use qmp just to organize the dependencies between these projects, without publishing them. We do that in our Java projects, where there's a private repository to store the projects;

So, the question is, can we do this using qpm?
And, there's a way to create a private repository to maintain these projects? (like Nexus with Maven)

Thank you!

[jrbarron]

@emersonsiega I'm not sure what you mean by using qpm just for organizing the dependancies without publishing. One thing I can say is that the downloading of dependancies and the generation of vendor.pri are two decoupled steps so you could in theory have a qpm.json in each of your dependancies and qpm will detect those (if they are in the vendor directory) and add them to the vendor.pri file.

As for publishing private repositories, it is something we have talked about, but not something we have given any priority to yet I'm afraid. Implementing this would involve us authenticating with Github which I think is a great idea, but is a large amount of work.

[oliviermaridat]

Thanks for the reply @jrbarron , I was actually wondering about this and did not find clearly the response in the doc. It may be useful to indicate this more clearly in the doc "QPM is only wired to the QPM repository (qpm.io) at the moment. This may change in the future.".

FYI, Qompoter, less advanced than qpm but still there, is able to handle several types of dependency repositories, especially private one (ordered or not ordered). This is its primary purpose. This is described there Notion of repository.

[emersonsiega]

@jrbarron and @oliviermaridat thank you for reply.

I don't know Qompoter yet, but after a superficial read, I think this is what we need at this moment.
I like very much the idea of implement support to private repositories in qpm, I hope you guys implement this in future :)

Thank you both for the help!

[jrbarron]

@oliviermaridat Nice! I wasn't aware of Qompoter until now. It's great to see more people working on this obvious shortcoming in the Qt ecosystem. I certainly noticed some similarities with qpm :)

qpm (the latest version) just clones projects with Git using HTTP. We could easily also support cloning over SSH which would technically make it possible to clone from private repositories, but to make the full qpm.io service work with private packages is a bit of work. Obviously we wouldn't be able to publish package info in the global registry for everyone to see so then the web site would require authentication which is not something it does today. Package discovery in general is a tricky problem to solve with private repositories. Ideally you would want someone from your Github organization to see your private packages when they run qpm search ... or qpm list, but not someone outside of the organization so a tighter integration with Github would be required to solve this properly.