[feature] location of the generated CMakeUserPresets.json

The Conan documentation states:

If you declare a layout() in the recipe and your CMakeLists.txt file is found in the conanfile.source_folder folder, Conan will place a CMakeUserPresets.json to include the CMakePresets.json generated with the above specification.

However, there is no way to set the source folder from the conan install command. Besides the obvious use case to override the defaults from the command line, such an option could also be useful in big projects to select which directory with CMakeLists.txt should be used as an entry point for CMake build. For example, if I have several standalone subprojects in the tree and only one conanfile.py to define the dependencies with conan install --source-folder I could control where the CMakeUserPresets.json is being generated and then build such a subproject in isolation using CMake presets.

Alternatively, CMakeUserPresets.json could be generated in the path of conan install invocation, but probably this is a worse solution.

• I’ve read the CONTRIBUTING guide.

[risa2000]

I would just like to add another observation. I have been using CMakeSettings.json which is Visual Studio specific and a kind of precursor for CMakePresets.json. Since the latest VS 2022 Microsoft is officially promoting using CMakePresets.json instead of CMakeSettings.json which is definitely a good move.

However, the way CMakeSettings.json were and CMakePresets.json are supposed to be used in VS IDE is quite different from what conan expects. So basically neither conan generated CMakePresets.json, nor CMakeUserPresets.json are really useful (in VS IDE context) and one would rather want a handcrafted CMakePresets.json which will include conan_toolchain.cmake as it did before, and would not want having conan messing with that. So an option to not generate those files could be useful too.

[lasote]

Hi, I renamed the issue and assigned it to the next release just to think about it. If we come up with some idea we could implement something.