vcpkg/docs/maintainers/control-files.md

CONTROL files

The CONTROL file contains metadata about the port. The syntax is based on the Debian control format although we only support the subset of fields documented here.

Field names are case-sensitive and start the line without leading whitespace. Paragraphs are separated by one or more empty lines.

Source Paragraph

The first paragraph in a CONTROL file is the Source paragraph. It must have a Source, Version, and Description field. It can optionally have a Build-Depends and Default-Features field.

Examples:

Source: ace
Version: 6.5.5-1
Description: The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment

Source: vtk
Version: 8.2.0-2
Description: Software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization
Build-Depends: zlib, libpng, tiff, libxml2, jsoncpp, glew, freetype, expat, hdf5, libjpeg-turbo, proj4, lz4, libtheora, atlmfc (windows), eigen3, double-conversion, pugixml, libharu, sqlite3, netcdf-c

Recognized fields

Source

The name of the port.

When adding new ports be aware that the name may conflict with other projects that are not a part of vcpkg. For example json conflicts with too many other projects so you should add a scope to the name such as taocpp-json to make it unique. Verify there are no conflicts on a search engine as well as on other package collections.

Package collections to check for conflicts:

• Repology
• Debian packages
• Packages search

Version

The port version.

This field is an alphanumeric string that may also contain ., _, or -. No attempt at ordering versions is made; all versions are treated as bit strings and are only evaluated for equality.

For tagged-release ports, we follow the following convention:

1. If the port follows a scheme like va.b.c, we remove the leading v. In this case, it becomes a.b.c.
2. If the port includes its own name in the version like curl-7_65_1, we remove the leading name: 7_65_1
3. If the port has been modified, we append a -N to distinguish the versions: 1.2.1-4

For rolling-release ports, we use the date that the commit was accessed by you, formatted as YYYY-MM-DD. Stated another way: if someone had a time machine and went to that date, they would see this commit as the latest master.

For example, given:

1. The latest commit was made on 2019-04-19
2. The current version string is 2019-02-14-1
3. Today's date is 2019-06-01.

Then if you update the source version today, you should give it version 2019-06-01. If you need to make a change which doesn't adjust the source version, you should give it version 2019-02-14-2.

Example:

Version: 1.0.5-2

Version: 2019-03-21

Description

A description of the library.

By convention the first line of the description is a summary of the library. An optional detailed description follows. The detailed description can be multiple lines, all starting with whitespace.

Example:

Description: C++ header-only JSON library

Description: Mosquitto is an open source message broker that implements the MQ Telemetry Transport protocol versions 3.1 and 3.1.1.
  MQTT provides a lightweight method of carrying out messaging using a publish/subscribe model. This makes it suitable for "machine 
  to machine" messaging such as with low power sensors or mobile devices such as phones, embedded computers or microcontrollers like the Arduino.

Homepage

The URL of the homepage for the library where a user is able to find additional documentation or the original source code.

Example:

Homepage: https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg

Build-Depends

Comma separated list of vcpkg ports the library has a dependency on.

Vcpkg does not distinguish between build-only dependencies and runtime dependencies. The complete list of dependencies needed to successfully use the library should be specified.

For example: websocketpp is a header only library, and thus does not require any dependencies at install time. However, downstream users need boost and openssl to make use of the library. Therefore, websocketpp lists boost and openssl as dependencies

Example:

Build-Depends: zlib, libpng, libjpeg-turbo, tiff

If the port is dependent on optional features of another library those can be specified using the portname[featurelist] syntax.

Dependencies can be filtered based on the target triplet to support different requirements on Windows Desktop versus the Universal Windows Platform. Currently, the string inside parentheses is substring-compared against the triplet name. There must be a space between the name of the port and the filter. This will change in a future version to not depend on the triplet name.

Example:

Build-Depends: curl[openssl] (!windows&!osx), curl[winssl] (windows), curl[darwinssl] (osx)

Default-Feature

Comma separated list of optional port features to install by default.

This field is optional.

Default-Features: dynamodb, s3, kinesis

Feature Paragraphs

Multiple optional features can be specified in the CONTROL files. It must have a Feature and Description field. It can optionally have a Build-Depends field. It must be separated from other paragraphs by one or more empty lines.

Example:

Source: vtk
Version: 8.2.0-2
Description: Software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization
Build-Depends: zlib, libpng, tiff, libxml2, jsoncpp, glew, freetype, expat, hdf5, libjpeg-turbo, proj4, lz4, libtheora, atlmfc (windows), eigen3, double-conversion, pugixml, libharu, sqlite3, netcdf-c

Feature: openvr
Description: OpenVR functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: sdl2, openvr

Feature: qt
Description: Qt functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: qt5

Feature: mpi
Description: MPI functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: msmpi, hdf5[parallel]

Feature: python
Description: Python functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: python3

Recognized fields

Feature

The name of the feature.

Description

A description of the feature using the same syntax as the port Description field.

Build-Depends

The list of dependencies required to build and use this feature.

On installation the dependencies from all selected features are combined to produce the full dependency list for the build. This field follows the same syntax as Build-Depends in the Source Paragraph.