Proposal: Gradle Wrapper-like functionality for vcpkg

[buracchi]

I would like to propose the idea of adding a Gradle Wrapper-like functionality to vcpkg. The aim is to provide an easy and consistent way to manage vcpkg and its dependencies within a project.

Currently, vcpkg requires manual setup and installation on each developer's machine and also requires package information to be included in the installation folder. This can result in inconsistencies across different environments and developers. Additionally, the size of the cloned vcpkg repository can be large, making repository management more challenging.

A Gradle Wrapper-like functionality would address these issues by allowing for automatic download and installation of vcpkg, ensuring that all developers are using the same version of vcpkg and that builds are consistent across different environments.

The proposed vcpkg wrapper command would work by creating a script called vcpkgw (or vcpkgw.bat on Windows) in the root directory of the project. This script would be responsible for downloading and running vcpkg.

When this script is run, it would check for the presence of vcpkg on the local machine by looking for the vcpkg executable in the system's PATH. If it is not found, it would download the appropriate version of vcpkg from the internet and save it in the project's root directory. A properties file named vcpkg-wrapper.properties would contain information such as the distribution URL and the version of vcpkg to be used.

Furthermore, this functionality should provide the option to choose between two modes of installation. One mode being minimal, where packages informations is fetched via internet from the GitHub repository, and the other being a full installation mode, where packages information is installed on the local machine, working in the current way.

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts and feedback on this proposal.

[buracchi]

Apparently there exist undocumented scripts that allow for a minimal installation of vcpkg. The scripts can be found at the following links:

• https://aka.ms/vcpkg-init.sh (for Linux and macOS)
• https://aka.ms/vcpkg-init.ps1 (for Windows PowerShell)
• https://aka.ms/vcpkg-init.cmd (for Windows Command Prompt)

I have tested the vcpkg-init.sh script and it downloaded the latest standalone bundle of vcpkg. The vcpkg instance required a manifest with a specified baseline in order to interact with ports as I would expect. However, the installation folder was in the user's home directory instead of the project root folder, I'm not sure if this is the optimal behaviour.