Please support hermetic builds (without Internet access)

[mgorny]

While working on packaging milvus-lite for RedHat AI we're facing serious issues with the current build system. Per our policy, all packages included need to be built airgapped from source. This means that the package must not fetch anything from the Internet, and ideally it should use system provided packages whenever possible.

Would you be willing to accept patches to make our workflows possible? To be honest, I think the most likely approach would be to make it possible to disable Conan entirely, and permit building with "pure" CMake, providing some fallback Find*.cmake modules for packages that do not ship CMake files upstream.

[xiaofan-luan]

we introduced conan to keep the compilation accelerated.

Yes, add a new mode to compile milvus/milvus-lite is without network is a good idea. We'd definitely glad to accept any contribution

[mgorny]

Thanks for your help so far. I think the next thing I could try doing is updating the code to build with newer versions of dependencies, and possibly with standard install of simdjson rather than the source tree. However, at least some of that would require changes to the milvus submodule. Do you have a preference how to approach that?