b.anonymousDependency: no dependency named X in build.zig.zon

[jmrico01]

Zig Version

0.12.0-dev.396+55f0d8b41

Steps to Reproduce and Observed Behavior

(Running on Windows 10)

Originally described the issue in #16354 (comment), but I'm opening a new issue since it seems to be a bit different and not addressed by those fixes.

To reproduce:

• Clone the anonymous_dependency branch of my zig-bugreport repository
• zig build

I get the following error, even though deps/common/build.zig.zon does declare a zigimg dependency:
no dependency named 'zigimg' in 'C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Development\zig-bugreport\deps\common\build.zig.zon'. All packages used in build.zig must be declared in this file.

Expected Behavior

zig-bugreport executable should compile successfully and be able to import the common module.

@mlugg for awareness, as they addressed the original issue

[mlugg]

This is a fundamental problem with anonymousDependency as a concept: since actual package management (in particular, reading and parsing build.zig.zon) is handled by the compiler rather than the build system in the standard library, dependencies added through anonymousDependency cannot themselves have dependencies, as they are unknown to the zig build command itself.

I think this is a strong argument of supporting something like #14603 for file-based dependencies, and maybe even removing anonymousDependency in favour of it. Another argument in favour of that PR is that it would allow us to easily set up automated testing for the full package manager (everything other than the actual dependency fetching logic), which is effectively impossible right now since all packages must be hosted online somewhere. @andrewrk, do you have any thoughts or an alternate solution to these issues?

[jmrico01]

Thanks, that's some great context. Commented with my thoughts on the PR, hopefully it's useful and not adding too much noise.

In the meantime, are there any workarounds for this? I'd like to leverage the package manager dependency import with a local Zig project that has its own set of dependencies. I tired declaring those downstream dependencies in a root-level build.zig.zon, but that doesn't work 😢

EDIT: Found 2 workarounds for now. The first is to change downstream .dependencys inside deps/common/build.zig to also use .anonymousDependency, so that no nested dependencies have to be fetched through the build.zig.zon. This is actually pretty doable with my setup. The second is to find the temporary dirs where dependencies are fetched and edit the code there to rebuild & test library changes. In Windows, the temp dir is C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\zig\p.

[castholm]

b.anonymousDependency was removed and support for relative paths in build.zig.zon added in 0.12 so this can probably be closed.

[jmrico01]

b.anonymousDependency was removed and support for relative paths in build.zig.zon added in 0.12 so this can probably be closed.

Yes, thanks! Forgot about this issue. I've been using relative paths in build.zig.zon without any problems. Closing...