If you are using Windows then Visual Studio is the answer - a correctly set up solution removes /every/ problem commonly associated with getting and building so

If you are using Windows then Visual Studio is the answer - a correctly set up solution removes /every/ problem commonly associated with getting and building source code. Since you have this problem at all though, I'm guessing you want a *nix solution of some kind... the best solution imo is to provide decent scripts in the source package which hide the configuration details, and try to arrange the source and dependencies so that you don't need to do any configuration just to get it to build at all.