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Not sure why folks think a “nodejs” type package manager is required…

For instance, what is this if not package management?

apt install libpng-dev

Sure that’s a package manager, but it’s a distro specific one. Now make one that works on all Linux distributions. And now make one that works on all operating systems.

This is the problem that npm, pip, and whatnot solve. They work the same, (almost) everywhere.

C/C++ don’t have a proper answer for it.

Well, the difference between C and Python or Node though is that C is used by the operating system APIs and so it is somewhat tied to each system and their package managers. In contrast, Python/Node exist for the most part at the application layer.

You can install apt / dpkg (or dnf / rpm, pacman, portage, nix, ...) on pretty much any distro. You are really just asking why there's no de-facto standard package manager for C like there is for those other languages.

It's distro-specific, for one.

At least it's not language specific.

It's pretty much C-specific. Packages for other languages tend to be pretty difficult to work with when installed this way (e.g. you end up with problems if you have 2 projects depending on different versions of the library)

How so? It's normal for incompatible versions to get parallel installations.

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