[question] how to get difference in conan recipes for two versions of the same dependency

[MartyMcFlyInTheSky]

What is your question?

I need to understand why suddenly boost breaks when updating my gdal dependency. For this I wanted to inspect the recipe of gdal version version 3.5.3 and 3.7.3 to see if they require different dependencies to boost. Is there a way in conan2 to compare the recipes of two versions of the same dependency?

Have you read the CONTRIBUTING guide?

• I've read the CONTRIBUTING guide

[AbrilRBS]

Hi @MartyMcFlyInTheSky thanks for the question.

I need to understand why suddenly boost breaks when updating my gdal dependency.

Note that conan center index recipes might update their dependencies to match requirements of the dependencies among other reasons.

Is there a way in conan2 to compare the recipes of two versions of the same dependency?

Yes! The newly introduced conan report diff command will give you the diff between not only the recipe, but the related sources too, with a built-in HTML viewer (That just got better for the next Conan 2.20 release!)

Running conan report diff --old-reference=gdal/3.5.3 --new-reference=gdal/3.7.3 -r=conancenter -f=html > diff.html will generate a diff (But the current 2.19 might struggle with such a big gdal source diff, I will discuss with the team if we want to have a way to avoid diffing the source and only keep the recipe diffs)

I have checked the current diff between both versions, and the gdal recipe did not change between both versions, so the difference in boost might come from a different place. Recall that Conan will log the dependency graph for each compilation, and checking that info can be an useful insight into what's changing (And running conan graph info ... --format=html will give you a graph viewer for the dependencies that might help you understand where the changes to boost are coming from)

If you need help figuring it out, feel free to paste those first graph lines/the error you're seeing, we're happy to help where possible :)

[memsharded]

Hi @MartyMcFlyInTheSky

Did you try the new conan report diff functionality? Any feedback?

@AbrilRBS did some recent further improvements to its html interface in #18686, that will be included in next Conan 2.21 release, are already merged in the develop2 branch if you want to try it running from source.

Thanks!