[JohnFen]

> to avoid the need to faff with a shitty build system.

Then maybe don't use a shitty build system?

It's true, C is not trying to be a programming environment or tech stack. It's a language, that's it. Whether or not that's desirable depends on what you're trying to do, it's not something that is good or bad in some absolute sense.

You have your choice of build systems, so pick one that meets your needs.

Vcpkg isn't for me, either, because it doesn't solve any problem I have. If it does for you, awesome!

[IshKebab]

> You have your choice of build systems, so pick one that meets your needs.

And can I pick the one that my dependencies use too? Didn't think so.

[JohnFen]

Your dependencies have already been built. You're just linking to them. So yes, you can.

[inferiorhuman]

And what if the dependencies haven't been built yet?

[JohnFen]

Then build them. I'm not seeing the issue here, to be honest, so I'm not sure what I should be addressing.

If the issue is that you don't like how the dependency has arranged to build (I'm not sure why you'd actually care, but just in case...), then port the makefile (or whatever) to your preferred system.

Or, another guess, is the issue that you want to build all your dependencies as if they were an integral part of your own project? If that's the case, I would argue that you're doing it wrong and another tech stack would make you happier.

[icedchai]

Build them and install them in /usr/local, just like we did 30 years ago.

[inferiorhuman]

With what? The whole point of this line of discussion is that building stuff in C is suboptimal, often requiring the end user to juggle n different build systems by hand to get all the dependencies installed.

Since we're talking FreeBSD here, thirty years ago we had Modula-3 whose build system is lightyears ahead of anything make based.

[icedchai]

You already answered your own question: with whatever tools that dependency requires, often ./configure && make && make install

In the event you find yourself doing this constantly, write a shell script.

[IshKebab]

Honestly if you lack the vision to see why that sucks I really suggest you try a language with good package management - e.g. Go or Rust. Maybe it will make it easier to see all the problems with the traditional C approach if you can see how it should work.

[icedchai]

C and C++ dependency installation is "sub-optimal" but it is certainly well understood. The fact that there are many cross platform, open source projects written in C and C++ proves this. If you can't deal with makefiles and scripts, maybe stick to Go and Rust?