[question] expected behavior for export-pkg tools.unzip

Conan version 1.11.1 Windows 10

I was wondering the expected behavior of tools.unzip when using the export-pkg command from outside the conanfile.py’s directory.

So taking the example package source directory and conanfile.py below:

└───some_path
    └───package
         ├───conanfile.py
         └───library.zip

from conans import ConanFile, tools

class ExampleConan(ConanFile):
    name = "library"
    version = "1.0"
    settings = "os", "arch"

    def package(self):
        zip_file = "library.zip"
        tools.unzip(zip_file)
        self.copy("*", dst="bin", src="bin", keep_path=False)

    def package_info(self):
        self.cpp_info.libs = tools.collect_libs(self)

The command below fails during the copy to find the unpacked contents of library.zip as it gets unzipped to the cwd(some_path).

# from outside the package's directory
conan export-pkg some_path/package example/stable

Is this the expected behavior? I got stuck on this thinking the expected behavior was for the library.zip to be unzipped into the same directory as the conanfile.py.

Or maybe another question, is it just ill advised to use export-pkg for my case and I should use exports_sources to export the library.zip and treat the unzip as a build step?

[conanuser1234]

Ok great! This makes sense to me. Big thanks for getting my question answered @jgsogo @Johnnyxy

[memsharded]

Hi all,

It is not clear to me the final conclusion, so please @conanuser1234 (also reference for other readers) take this into account:

• If library.zip contains pre-compiled binaries (.lib, .a, .so, .dylib, .h, etc), or final artifacts (headers in case of header-only library) to be packaged, then, yes, the way to package them is with conan export-pkg. Please do not use exports_sources for that. In this case, the recipe won’t be building anything with build().

• If library.zip contains the source-code, then conan export-pkg is useless, and indeed you should use exports_sources or other source method (like SCM). The recipe will have a build() method in which the binary artifacts will be built from source.

I hope this helps. Cheers.