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Why isn't a build tool a dependency? Seems arbitrary to me.

Because it isn't needed at runtime. Definitely not arbitrary. scons isn't a dependency of Google Chrome.

Yeah I guess that makes sense. Fair enough.

Because when we talk about dependencies we usually talk about runtime dependencies. If you'll need to load other stuff to run this as an end user.

Do you count gcc and make as "dependencies" on installing and/or running some software built with them?

I would suggest something analogous to "static build" rather than anything having to do with dependencies.

By that reasoning everything is dependency free, because I can just static link all the required libraries, or provide them in a vendor directory in the download.