xrepo VS lhelper

I have a suggestion that almost nobody knows about. It's called "xrepo" and it's designed to go a long with "xmake" (which is an excellent build tool), but xrepo is technically seperate from xmake. Literally, way too much info to put it all here, but you (and everyone) should SERIOUSLY check it out. Xmake: https://github.com/xmake-io/xmake/ Xrepo: https://github.com/xmake-io/xrepo

I have made my own tool to solve this problem:

https://github.com/franko/lhelper

It is currently used by nobody except me but it serves me well.

Its strong points are:

- it works on macOS, Linux and Windows

I agree, for their use case they should have linked to SDL2 as a static library. It was the best option instead of patching the binary with patchelf.

I think many developers don't know about static libraries. For some reason they think they have to use a shared libraries. This is probably due to many tutorial saying something like: download the SDL2 library from there, it is provided as a shared library, here the instructions to use it with Visual Studio.

The way I do is with static libraries, I ship a single executable, all the third-party libraries are linked in as static libraries. The only dynamic libraries the exectuable will use are the standard libraries that are part of the OS.

I do this very easily with the help for lhelper:

https://github.com/franko/lhelper (I am the author)

that has recipes to build many libraries including SDL2. It builds the library on you system using your compiler and your settings. By default it will build static libraries so you don't have to bother distributing additional dynamic libraries.