| There is a lot more going on here. The first issue is actually downloading the dependencies, doing this manually quickly becomes infeasible for any non-trivial project. The second issue is keeping everything updated, and making sure that all packages are compatible with all other packages. Doing this manually is also not easy. With C specifically, you need to wrangle different build systems, and once you have them built and "installed", you need to figure out which linker and compiler flags are needed to consume the libraries. If you are working on a small project with maybe a few dependencies you can do this by hand, but when you get to say, 15 dependencies, it quickly becomes very difficult. You can use the system package manager on some systems to install libraries I guess (assuming it has the packages and versions that you need), in this case manually managing things could be a lot easier, but you still should be using pkg-config for portability purposes. |