Under Windows and OSX, statically-linked or self-contained packages are indeed the only way to stay sane when deploying an application. However, this comes at

Under Windows and OSX, statically-linked or self-contained packages are indeed the only way to stay sane when deploying an application. However, this comes at a price: You'll always have to provide a newer version of the application whenever a serious issue is fixed in one of your dependency libraries. This means extra work for you. Also, you'll have to take care of an auto-upgrade mechanism. On systems with a package manager, you'll only have to provide updates if you fix an issue in the application itself. You also don't have to write an auto-upgrade mechanism. Just upload a new package to your server. However, if you don't care that much about users' security, statically linking is indeed a lot less work than using a package manager. (FWIW, I'm the maintainer of Mingw-cross-env (http://mingw-cross-env.nongnu.org/ http://mingw-cross-env.nongnu.org/). This is a project that provides a cross-build toolchain for statically linked Windows applications. It builds a cross compiler and lots of free software libraries. We have that kind of discussion from time to time on our mailing list.)