Hello,

Thanks to the opportunity of being on site for cppcon (yay), me, Bret,
Gabriel and Cameron had an opportunity to talk about the direction we're
going for how to distribute libraries with C++ modules.

In that conversation we got to an agreement that we should also explore the
possibility of making this a solution that is not exclusive for modules,
and take a step back for a more generic solution.

I'm volunteering to drive the coordination work for a paper framing the
requirements for a specification that would allow package managers and
build systems to communicate on how to consume a prebuilt library.

I should clarify up front that the goal here is not to specify the format
of library packages, the mechanism to resolve versions and how to fetch the
package. In fact, the goal is that this should be something that fills
existing gaps in the interactions between different package managers and
different build systems, hopefully allowing more interoperability amongst
the players that are already in this space.

So, I'm starting this effort with a request for comments on:

What are things that your build system needs to know when consuming a
prebuilt library? What are the non-obvious cases? What are the
architecture-specific details?

daniel