Thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread so far. This has been
very helpful.

I think we still have some more "divergent thinking" to do before we can
start converging on where we actually want to get to. So I decided to write
a little "brain dump" of everything that we talked about here (as well as
some other input I got in person at cppcon). This is in no way intended to
be a proposal, I'm just trying to organize all the different points into
some coherent form, so we can validate that we documented everything we
need to know.

Please consider taking a look at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oy6cooJdYVFF_sVPx8IFRlARjkzyMuW4GWWEIgUUZRs/edit?usp=sharing
and leaving comments or edits on the document. Note that at this point
we're not trying to say if a requirement is important to every use case or
not. We're just trying to map if there is any "theme" that we are missing,
or if there are themes that need to be broken down into separate concerns,
or maybe some aspect on that theme that is missing or is redundant with
other themes.

On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 12:08 PM Daniel Ruoso <daniel_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>