[question] How come conan create lock requires access to remotes?

I am trying to execute the command conan lock create conanfile.py -pr=<profile> --base --lockfile-out=<lockfile path> while my wifi is off, and I get a message saying Unable to connect to .... saying that my remotes aren’t reachable. Please note that I am not using the --update flag.

How come this command needs to be able to access remotes? Assuming all recipes referenced in my conanfile.py are in my cache, I would not need to download any recipes. What is this request to the remotes for?

This is on macOS, and my conan version is 1.40.2

• I’ve read the CONTRIBUTING guide.

[tolstikh]

Thanks @memsharded for answering my questions, its much appreciated. I have a clearer picture of the situation.

[memsharded]

I can confirm that --build allows me to lock when disconnected from the internet. Are there any other consequences to setting that flag? If not, perhaps that should be set. To me it seems that the availability of a binary package is incidental to locking, given that you can determine the needed package ID without actually building anything.

Not always. There are some corner cases, like when using the package_revision_mode that without building the upstream packages won’t be able to compute the downstream package_id. We would also like to get rid of this case, maybe in 2.0, we will see…

One consequence of using --build is that the package_revisions will not be locked. That is not a problem if not relying on using different package_revisions, which is not recommended and should only happen in uncontrolled (a bit pathological) environments.