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Dependencies

Who supplies what, and why there is no fourth package manager. The build commands live in TESTING.md; the machine-level rules (port first, then brew, vcpkg for C/C++) are one line in AGENTS.md.

The four suppliers, and what each owns

Supplier Owns Why it is the owner
macOS Qt kit (MacPorts /opt/local, previously Homebrew) Qt 6.12, OpenGL This macOS is older than Homebrew supports well. Qt is a shared, version-matched tree — building it per-project would cost hours and would not match the plugins the app ships against.
vcpkg (Windows CI only) TagLib, FFmpeg, GLEW, projectM's own deps The Windows lane has no system package manager for these, and the triplet must match Qt's /MD runtime — see T0298 in TODO.md.
pkg-config (macOS, Linux) TagLib, FFmpeg (libavcodec, libavformat, libavutil, libswscale, libswresample) Both ship .pc files on every distro worth targeting, and the probe in cmake/Dependencies.cmake already carries the keg-only//opt/local fallback.
CPM.cmake projectM, and fmt/spdlog/toml++ only when no system copy is found Small, header-only or four-file libraries where a system copy is a preference, not a requirement. glm and Qt are find_package-required and are never fetched. Every CPM dependency is pinned to the commit its tag names, not to the tag, so a re-cut tag cannot change a fresh build dir.

CMakeLists.txt enforces C++23 at configure time; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

The preset pack

Not a dependency — data the visualizer cannot work without. projectM ships no presets, so a build with none can only ever draw projectM's built-in idle preset, which is one picture for every recording.

cmake/PresetPack.cmake fetches projectM-visualizer/presets-cream-of-the-crop — the pack the projectM project itself calls its default, ~9,800 .milk presets in category folders — into the build directory (never the source tree), compiles its path into the binary so a dev build finds it, installs it to share/chadvis-projectm-qt/presets, and on macOS copies it into ChadVis.app/Contents/Resources/presets so a drag-to-/Applications install carries it. file::presetsDir() owns discovery; CONFIG.md lists the probe order.

  • Offline is not a failure. A failed download, a 404, a timeout or a truncated archive warns and leaves the path empty; the app then shows the idle preset exactly as before.
  • -DCHADVIS_BUNDLE_PRESETS=OFF skips it, for a stripped build or a distro that packages presets itself.
  • Licensing. The pack's LICENSE.md travels with it and is installed alongside: the presets were never released under individual licences, the projectM project redistributes them as its default pack, and it removes any preset on an author's request. This repository does not vendor them; the build fetches them from upstream, which keeps the licence claim where it belongs.

Why not Conan

Conan 2 is a good tool and this project is the kind of project it is good at — but it would be a third dependency path beside two that already work, and the gaps it is usually proposed to close are already tracked:

  • Pinning. Nine of fifteen dependencies are unpinned (T0090) and the Windows lane has no vcpkg.json (T0091). Conan fixes both by replacing CPM and vcpkg, not by adding to them: a half-migrated tree is worse than an unpinned one, because two graphs then disagree about the same library.
  • Qt. A Conan Qt recipe either builds from source against this old Intel macOS, or needs a binary package that does not exist for Qt 6.12 there. Qt stays a system kit.
  • projectM. The pin lives in cmake/FindProjectM4.cmake and is a deliberate policy decision (T0164), not a version to be resolved. A Conan recipe would have to mirror the pin exactly to gain nothing. Changed 2026-10-31 by owner decision: the pin is now unreleased master 349b7cc (4.2.0-dev) instead of tag v4.1.8, because projectm_set_frame_time() (the only offline-render time source) exists only on master. Consequences, stated plainly: master is unreleased, so a future upgrade is a deliberate re-pin and a rebuild, not a tag move; and master's vendored glm collides with this tree's system glm, so the CPM options must keep ENABLE_SYSTEM_GLM ON. Reverting is one line back to 4967dc003… (v4.1.8), which built cleanly on this box. Verified: full --fast --tests build + unit_tests all suites 0 on the master pin.
  • CPM source cache. CPM_SOURCE_CACHE now defaults to <source>/.cpm-cache instead of OFF (same owner decision, closing half of T0090): one checkout shared by every build profile rather than a fresh clone per build directory. CPM_SOURCE_CACHE in the environment or the cache overrides it.
  • Reproducibility, the real benefit, is a CI property here. The honest cheap fix is to pin the CPM tags to commit SHAs and check in a manifest the release lane can read (T0090, T0091, T0301 — SBOM), which is hours of work rather than a cross-platform packaging migration.

Reopen this decision only if the tree needs a dependency no supplier above can provide on two of the three platforms, or if CI reproducibility becomes a release blocker that pinning CPM and a vcpkg.json cannot answer. Record the reason in TODO.md first; this file is the owning document.