Conan is a cross-platform package manager for (notably) C and C++. It can be used to get access to dependencies required by the pack. This notably provides an alternative for libraries that are either not well maintained by e.g., the Linux distributions or where the public versions are often outdated.

A conan step is excuted if a file conanfile.txt or conanfile.py is found. This plugin knows about conan virtualenv and if this is enabled it adds the environment settings from the generated vitualenv to the build process.