[reactordev]

To further these suggestions. Act as if your "installation" is your "deployment" and perform all the necessary checks to ensure your dependencies are there (and are the correct versions) before running. In .Net, this is handled for you mostly by the framework. In Go, everything is compiled together mostly so you (again) don't have to worry about it. In javascript or python it's assumed that you can npm install or pip install your requirements and that the versions will match. From there, you can treat that as your final build and run it.

As a C++ game developer myself, I make sure that my dependencies are part of my repo as submodules so that I can update/pull and build the version I need to from git tag versions.

So if you are tagging your releases, your final outputs, in your git source tree, then going back to a version from 20 years ago is just as simple as git checkout v0.0.1

Vcpkg for C++ dependencies is another option (my preferred if you don't go git submodule route) and ALWAYS USE CMAKE! Don't opt for some crazy build setup, or some internal build tool used by <insert FAANG here> that they force you to use (V8 team, if you're reading this, fix your build pipeline).

KISS. Keep it simple slick. If your package isn't available in the OS package manager, it's time to adopt a package manager or adopt a devops practice that allows you to revert to any version of the code you need (git submodule route).