Conan + Rez

[Alexander Kalyuzhnyy]

Hi, I think it could be my first post here.

I'm working for feature animation studio, and yes,  we "using" rez. Quoutes is intentional, because I feel we are not using it on 100% properly.

My main love with rez, that its very good for environment management from central storage installed packages. BUT

* We have a lot of windows users and remote workers(local installs with rez packages)

* We dont use rez-suite on windows, instead we have dedicated app launcher that mimics rez-suite

* We use gitlab for dev, and trying to improve CI/CD(including windows)

* We trying to go with rez-build but slowly and painfully in attempt to improve dev experience

* with WFH devs could prefer localized packages and not RDP/Remote, and thats painful to deliver properly

* Release/debug variants is very painful, but could be essential for artist support and dev/artist experience.

So my question is, whats everyone today workflow with rez/gitlab(I know a lot of studios use gitlab for internal work).

In my thinking conan+rez hybrid could be partial solution. Idea is not new, its described here

https://lists.aswf.io/g/tac/topic/29512820

and here

https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez/issues/642

Conan itself support release/debug variants, and have package storage servers like

* https://jfrog.com/artifactory/

* https://www.sonatype.com/product-nexus-repository

* https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-core/ and soon gitlab itself

this useful for

* isolated gitlab runner build, without need to access central storage filesytem, could be painful for windows

* better remote developer experience/package localization

* you can pull debug builds whenever you need it

My idea that you can generate package.py file for each conan package and install to central storage as deployment.

Obviosly, it can be painful, because you not testing in environment where you run the app, and can run in resolve rules differences very quickly.

Other approach, I heard of, is to write custom package repository plugin,that could retrieve all data from some remote storage. It could be even gitlab backed(using releases), so this way we can

* remote worker localization

* gitlab runner without access to central storage

* but no solution for release/debug variants

Looking forward to hear your thoughts about topic.

Thanks,

Alex