Sure, but you need to be root to install those, they're not portable, and there's no workspace isolation or build system consistency— yes CMake has bridge metho

Sure, but you need to be root to install those, they're not portable, and there's no workspace isolation or build system consistency— yes CMake has bridge methods to work with autotools/pkg-config, but it's all pretty hacky. For a tool that does attempt to do virtualenv-like workspaces for C++ packages, see colcon [1], but there are still a lot of rough edges there— it's an evolution of the catkin multi package build system/tool from the ROS ecosystem, and part of the promise of it is a pluggable mechanism for discovering the packages in your workspace to avoid needing to a patch in a special XML file containing dependency information. [1]: https://colcon.readthedocs.io/ https://colcon.readthedocs.io/