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The closest thing we have at the moment is conan[1]. It’s a cross platform package manager that attempts to implement “toolchains”, whereby different build systems can be integrated[2]. This is a big problem with package management in C/C++, there’s no single, standardised build system that most projects use. There isn’t even a standardised compiler! So when hosting your own packages using Conan, often you need to make sure you build your application for three different compilers, for three different platforms. Sometimes (for modern MacOS) also for two different architectures each.
If you control the compiler AND build system you can get away with just one package for most cases. This true for Microsoft’s C/C++ package manager, NuGet[3]
Historically, the convention has been to use the package manager of the underlying system to install packages, as there are so many different build configurations to worry about when packaging the libraries. The other advantage of using the system package manager is that dependencies (shared libraries) that are common can be shared between many applications, saving space.
[1] https://conan.io/
Agreed. Version resolution is the interesting problem.
Most package managers use a SAT solver to resolve dependencies. The Dart team has a detailed write up on their SAT-based approach which is worth a read [1]. For contrast, Russ Cox presents an algorithm that doesn't use a SAT solver (intended for Go) [2].
[1] https://github.com/dart-lang/pub/blob/master/doc/solver.md
[2] https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs
Something like Meta Package Manager? https://github.com/kdeldycke/meta-package-manager