OK, so in modern, sensible development platforms you have a means to specify dependencies and install them.
From what I’ve seen, the world of Linux/C/Vala development currently doesn’t have such a thing. Folks list their dependencies in readme files and you’re supposed to install them one by one, e.g., using apt. (Please someone correct me if I’m wrong, as I’d LOVE to be wrong on this.)
So, question, before I shave yet another yak: do any dependency management systems exist for this?
@aral
When I built valent (a GTK4 application in C) using meson, it seemed to have detected that I didn't have libadwaita installed, and cloned and built that from source.
@aral that information is probably for people packaging it or installing it manually
@aral Meson subprojects + Vala are not a very nice combination (yet). There are some bugs to solve that could hinder your experience a lot
@everlastingrocks Hmm… the recommended workflow for elementary OS apps is to use Meson but dependencies are still listed in readme files for manual installation. I’m assuming there’s a reason Meson’s dependency system is not used exclusively? (Perhaps due to performance reasons of building bigger libraries from source?)
CC @cassidyjames @danrabbit