You seem to be mixing up distro package managers and language package managers. Distro package managers don't let you do versioning in any reasonable way, and

You seem to be mixing up distro package managers and language package managers. Distro package managers don't let you do versioning in any reasonable way, and they are OS-specific, so they are not good for versioning dependencies of a software project. In particular, if you want reproducible builds, you're out of luck. > As a user I have absolutely no control or visibility of what versions of dependencies are in there. Which is also true of header-only libraries for C, or vendored dependencies. While sometimes shared libraries are used by projects, it's certainly not the only way dependencies are handled in C/C++ land. The only reasonable solution I see to combining a distro package manager with a language package manager is the nix package manager...if only it was more cross platform. As it is now, it only supports Linux and macOS.