compatibility()¶

Warning

This is a preview feature

The compatibility() method implements the same binary compatibility mechanism than the compatibility plugin, but at the recipe level. In general, the global compatibility plugin should be good for most cases, and only require the recipe method for exceptional cases.

This method can be used in a conanfile.py to define packages that are compatible between each other. If there are no binaries available for the requested settings and options, this mechanism will retrieve the compatible package’s binaries if they exist. This method should return a list of compatible configurations.

For example, if we want that binaries built with gcc versions 4.8, 4.7 and 4.6 to be considered compatible with the ones compiled with 4.9 we could declare a compatibility() method like this:

def compatibility(self):
    if self.settings.compiler == "gcc" and self.settings.compiler.version == "4.9":
        return [{"settings": [("compiler.version", v)]}
                for v in ("4.8", "4.7", "4.6")]

The format of the list returned is as shown below:

[
    {
        "settings": [(<setting>, <value>), (<setting>, <value>), ...],
        "options": [(<option>, <value>), (<option>, <value>), ...]
    },
    {
        "settings": [(<setting>, <value>), (<setting>, <value>), ...],
        "options": [(<option>, <value>), (<option>, <value>), ...]
    },
    ...
]