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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T16:18:04+00:00

We have a project that is going to require linking against libcurl and libxml2

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We have a project that is going to require linking against libcurl and libxml2, among other libraries. We seem to have essentially two strategies for managing these depencies:

  1. Ask each developer to install those libraries under the “usual” locations, e.g. /usr/lib, or

  2. Include the sources to these libraries under a dedicated folder in the project’s source tree.

Approach 1 requires everyone to make sure those libraries are installed on their system, but appears to be the approach used by many open source projects. On such projects, the build will detect that those libraries are missing and will fail.

Approach 2 might make the project tree unmanageably large in some instances and make the compilation time much longer. In addition, this approach can obviously be taken too far. I wouldn’t put the compiler under the project tree, for instance (right?).

What are the best practices wrt external dependencies? Can/should one require of every developer to have certain libraries installed to build the project? Or is considered better to include all the dependencies in the project tree?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Don’t bother about their exact location in your code. Locating them should be handled by the used compiler/linker (or the user by setting variables) if they’re common. For very uncommon dependencies (or ones with customized/modified files) you might want to include them in your source (if possible due to licensing etc.).

    If you’d like it more convenient, you should use some script (e.g. configure or CMake) to setup/create the build files being used. CMake for example allows you to set different packages (libcurl and libxml2 in your example) as optional and required. When building the project it will try to locate those, if that fails it will ask the user. This IS an additional step and might make building a bit more cumbersome but it will also make downloading faster (smaller source) as well as updating easier (as all you have to do is rebuild your program).

    So in general I’d follow approach 1, if there’s special/rare/customized stuff being used, approach 2.

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