Thanks Kevin for sharing this with us. It does look like a very good idea. In the current state and from what I understand from conan.io, it would be possible to write a community plugin to support this. This would be the preferred direction.
Regarding the roadmap for native dependency management, we started breaking down the work required to achieve this. As a first step, we need to migrate the local dependency management to what is used in the JVM space as it’s much more flexible. Native heavily use variant dependency management which is currently been added to the JVM domain. Once we migrate, we will be able to connect and use the much more powerful API for remote dependency.
In its current state, it is possible and was achieved, to publish native artifact using ivy. Resolution is a bit more complicated as the ivy API is not easily accessible through Gradle. However, it is possible to use the ivy client directly to achieve the flexibility required. Quite some work need to be tackled before it can be used effortlessly.
Don’t hesitate to ask more questions,
Daniel