[MXNET-1229] use conan to manage project dependencies

• Type: Improvement
• Status: To Do
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: CI Build
• Assignee: Marco de Abreu
• Reporter: Konstantin Ivlev
• Created: 25/Nov/18 10:15
• Updated: 18/Jul/19 18:06

Description

conan is an open-source package manager for C++ projects. it allows to manage project dependencies in transparent and declarative manner.

currently, apache incubator-mxnet project uses the following different ways to manage its dependencies:

• download GitHub archives during the build
  • OpenBLAS
  • OpenCV
• conda (alternative way to GitHub archives)
• download from CMake
  • Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL)
• Git submodules
  • cub
  • dlpack
  • dmlc-core
  • googletest
  • mkldnn
  • mshadow
  • openmp
  • ps-lite
  • tvm

this appears to be very heterogeneous and hard to manage/maintain, as multiple various commands are in use to achieve dependencies installation, as well as multiple places are to look for dependency versions and their updates.

with conan, it may became much more straightforward, as dependencies will be declared in single place (conanfile) and installed via single command (conan install).

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #13400