Feature: model intra-package dependencies

From https://github.com/conan-io/conan/issues/2382

This could help both to model system dependencies self.cpp_info.libs = ["mylib", "pthread"], and then some consumer can depend on pthread by other means, and the order mylib->pthread is not defined.

It can be generalized for your own libs deps “Mylib1”->“MyLib2” inside the same package.

[sigiesec]

This feature should also integrate with frequently used build systems such as CMake. CMake has the information on intra-package dependencies (as well as other information such as public compile options etc.), and it would be very desirable if one wouldn’t have to specify this redundantly in the conanfile.py

[SSE4]

so, for instance, if we have ffmpeg library which provides the following libraries: libavcodec, libavformat, libavfilter, etc. which might be used independently. so, it would be nice to define in conanfile.py something like this:

self.cpp_info.libavcodec.libs = ['avcodec']
self.cpp_info.libavformat.libs = ['avformat']
self.cpp_info.libavfilter.libs = ['avfilter']

and then, in consumer (e.g. CMake one), we can link to the particular libraries:

target_link_libraries(exe_using_avcodec PRIVATE CONAN_PKG::ffmpeg::libavcodec)
...
target_link_libraries(exe_using_avformat PRIVATE CONAN_PKG::ffmpeg::libavformat)

this is very conceptual, and actual syntax might be very different from my examples, but I guess you got the idea behind it. same probably applies to lots of other multilib packages (like Qt, wxWidgets, OpenCV, GStreamer, etc.) these libraries build as a single, and it’s not feasible to split each of them into multiple conan files (as code will be the almost the same), like in boost case.