Less manual steps; support for automating recurring tasks?

[afri-bit]

Discussed in #51

^{Originally posted by schwaerz February 20, 2025}
We would like to promote the VSConan plugin to be used by our stakeholders. Currently, however the setup still involves more manual steps then some of the stakeholders would like to see. We drafted the following diagram:

We were wondering whether it would fit to the scope of the plugin to automate the following steps (possibly even executing things automatically upon opening a Conan project:

1. Installing python requirements (i.e. calling pdm install in our case; should be flexible to support other venv managers)
2. Installing Conan dependencies & generate the cmake presets for different configurations all-at-once
3. Activate the / a (default) build environment

We'd be willing to contribute most or all of it to your plugin. However we'd like to first check with you whether you'd agree to have this done as part of your plugin - or whether we possibly should go for something on top.

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Result of the Discussion

Each command in the command container will be equipped with pre and post task.
For example, in case of conan install command, user can execute some steps before it reaches the steps where the actual conan install command is executed