[question] Is modifying properties of a dependency allowed/supported? Where should it be done?

I’m creating conan recipes for external projects. So it would be nice to avoid patches where I can.

A certain project I’m packaging uses names for the CMake modules that are different then conan’s default. It uses jansson as a dependency, which does not set a certain cmake_file_name. Because of this, conan will generate janssonConfig.cmake, generating the jansson::jansson target. But the projects expect JanssonConfig.cmake, creating Jansson::Jansson (the project contains a FindJansson.cmake module.

In the recipe, I can fix this by donig:

    def generate(self):
        if self.options.with_jansson:
            self.dependencies["jansson"].cpp_info.set_property("cmake_file_name", "Jansson")
            self.dependencies["jansson"].cpp_info.set_property("cmake_target_name", "Jansson::Jansson")
            self.dependencies["jansson"].cpp_info.set_property("cmake_module_file_name", "Jansson")
            self.dependencies["jansson"].cpp_info.set_property("cmake_module_target_name", "Jansson::Jansson")
        deps = CMakeDeps(self)
        deps.generate()

But it’s not clear to me whether this is allowed by conan. Also, I hope this modification of the jansson properties remain local to my recipe, and won’t bubble out to dependencies.

• I’ve read the CONTRIBUTING guide.

[memsharded]

Ok, then I think we can close this question, responded as no, modifying dependencies information is not allowed, and we can spin a new ticket for this CMakeDeps configuration

[madebr]

Yes, applying the changes to CMakeDeps makes more sense. As we want to only change the output files of CMakeDeps, and not the dependency tree.