[fsloth]

There are very good reasons for closed source projects in fact not to use public repositories but the very least org-internal forks/mirrors. In that case dependency management referring fixed public repositories is no-go. If there are better solutions than submodules for these I would love to know. Fetch-content might do the trick? (Specifically, a complex project composed only of private git repositories).

[delta_p_delta_x]

> If there are better solutions than submodules for these I would love to know.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/vcpkg/concepts/registries and

In essence:

- Publish your local/private mirror of the 3rd-party dep

- Edit the portfile for each dependency to point to your private repo, usually in `vcpkg_from_git`, `vcpkg_from_github`, `vcpkg_from_gitlab`, or `vcpkg_from_bitbucket`

- Publish these portfiles to your private vcpkg registry

- Set the registry in vcpkg-configuration.json (or the `vcpkg-configuration` field in vcpkg.json) to your private registry

Done.

[fsloth]

Thank you!

[spookie]

I prefer ExternalProject_Add because that way I have full control of the build process. Adding even more abstractions leads to issues, edge cases and the like.