[tom_]

Perhaps they configured it that way? Maybe these are optional dependencies that provide additional functionality.

I was able to build it on a Ubuntu VM after installing no more than gcc, g++ and make.

apt list --installed suggests this VM does have a surprising amount of stuff installed (more than I'd expected at any rate), but of the dependencies you list it appears to have zlib, curl, and nothing else.

[nwmcsween]

Gentoo gives 'use' flags for configurable options, I stripped those out and posted the hard dependencies.

[__flo]

FreeBSD only lists 6:

> libcurl.so : ftp/curl > libexpat.so : textproc/expat2 > libjsoncpp.so : devel/jsoncpp > libuv.so : devel/libuv > librhash.so : security/rhash > libarchive.so.13 : archivers/libarchive

https://www.freshports.org/devel/cmake/

I also build CMake from source on Ubuntu (because they used to ship ridicously ancient versions and I have keep doing it since) and there is the possibility to use bundled versions of those dependencies. Also, for a development tool I see nothing wrong with those dependencies, I do not have to redistribute all of this.

And for those compiling everything from source like Gentoo or FreeBSD ports users, I do not understand it because most of the time is spent on building gcc or clang anyway which is absolutely not optional.