alt Hacker NewsThe idea is that dev packages dependencies in lib folder, so when people retrieve sources, they also retrieve all dependencies.
But you are right, that this is some extra work for dev, so this is question of trade offs: do you want to deal with all C++ build tooling mess, or you are Ok to do some manual steps.
Another alternative is to use some popular stable linux distro as build platform, then many libs will be packaged as part of that distro.
Oh, you mean vendoring. Yes, you can do that, but there is no easy support for keeping those vendored dependencies in sync with upstream. And if you want really nice things like notifications when those dependencies have security updates that you need to apply --- forget it.