[account42]

> It might be possible for us to configure our build system to recompile every library we depend on as static and relocatable, but that'd be quite a bit of effort to set up.

Sounds like you already know the solution to your problems. Link all your dependencies into your plugin, hide all symbols except the plugin interface and base system ones and you can make your plugin distro-agnostic. If you depend on external shared libraries then yes, your interface to the system becomes a lot more complex and thereby brittle.

[wheels]

There are 53 shared libraries that our small app depends on (this is not strange on Linux). Getting them set up to all be built independently by our build system would be a large task, and a large thing to maintain. Technically it's probably the best way to go, but it's probably a week solid of work, and probably not worth it to support our small number of Linux users.