> I feel that if the author took the time to learn the problem domain well and why conan & vcpkg happen to exist, then this article wouldn't have been written.

> I feel that if the author took the time to learn the problem domain well and why conan & vcpkg happen to exist, then this article wouldn't have been written. It's not like people that started conan/vcpkg didn't know about cmake's FetchContent and friends. Exactly this. I would add that the author, for some reason, left out the most basic and I dare standard way to manage third-party dependencies: have a setup/provision script that downloads and installs dependencies locally. You know, what Conan does, but ad-hoc. In Linux it might be just a call to the package manager to install stuff from a djstro's dependencies, a kin to NPM's npm install. In Windows it might even be a big whole zip file bundling prebuilt binaries.