With CMake you can build statically in a very reproducible cross platform way if you use Hunter and toolchain files. the tools are all there - just they're not

With CMake you can build statically in a very reproducible cross platform way if you use Hunter and toolchain files. the tools are all there - just they're not popular and aren't widely used I wrote a bit of an old intro to the workflow: https://geokon-gh.github.io/hunterintro.html https://geokon-gh.github.io/hunterintro.html This is an example of a project that's well setup using this pattern: https://github.com/elucideye/drishti https://github.com/elucideye/drishti And having things work dynamically ... well that's what package maintainers due. It seems inherently very fragile. Developers only build test and develop against whatever dependency versions they have locally. you can't test against every version under the sun