I was creating this ticket ARROW-17295 [1], but ended up unsure if this is something we'd like to maintain, so I thought I would bring it up for discussion. Essentially: should we expand the capabilities of our bundled dependency system? Or should we constrain the scope and point users that wish for more functionality toward package managers such as vcpkg and Conan?
My understanding is that our bundled dependency system was created to fill the gaps where package managers failed to provide working builds or a recent enough version of a package. More recently, we added support for vcpkg and have started to use that in many of our CI and packaging builds [2]. And in the past few months, we have worked on adding support for Conan [3]. So my question is what is the future of Arrow C++'s bundled dependency system? Do we want: (a) To expand its functionality and encourage use by downstream projects (b) Keep as is, and consider it primarily for internal use (c) Move away from it in favor of using vcpkg or conan [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-17295 [2] https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/dev/tasks/python-wheels/github.osx.amd64.yml [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-16089
