The title made me think there was a cargo subcommand `cargo copy`.

Me too, I immediately tried to look it up!

Regarding compilecommands.json ... I assume you intened crow packages to be portable, how would one specify macos , linux, windows compile command separatly?

Most libraries build with cmake, make etc, how does this interact?

I don't think cpp programmers will use a package manager written in rust.

Why not? Do people really care about implementation language that much? Would they even notice if they installed with apt or whatever?

conan was written in python. so, why not rust?

Noble effort but that ship has sailed. Cargo works because it was there from the start so basically everyone uses it.

C++ doesn't have one true package manager which means all third party dependencies will use totally different build systems and you can never have an easy `cargo add ...`. The closest I know of is vcpkg which has a decent selection but even then it's missing lots and still really clunky to set up.

I also worry about unpopular software repositories like that - it would be very easy to take some popular software that isn't packaged there, add it, bide your time and then poke some malware in. You don't even need to gain the original maintainers' trust.

The same applies to things like Flathub. I'm really surprised it hasn't happened yet (as far as I know).

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It would help to have some documentation, and maybe a comment about what this does better/differently than vcpkg+ninja, which quite frankly works really well.