In theory there is no reason why build tools can't be integrated with package managers so you don't experience that kind of silliness. For development purposes

In theory there is no reason why build tools can't be integrated with package managers so you don't experience that kind of silliness. For development purposes, you may want to have the system build everything from source (and/or fetching pre-compiled modules from a build system repository), and output a self-contained tree of local files that you can run. For release purposes, you can in theory output a package manager package (RPM, .deb, etc.) that contains only your own code's binaries and dependency declarations that the package manager can go satisfy. There seems to be some degree of integration with build2 (see https://build2.org/faq.xhtml#why-syspkg https://build2.org/faq.xhtml#why-syspkg ) though I don't know how much exactly or whether they go as far as what I'm describing.