Wrap dependency system manual

One of the major problems of multiplatform development is wrangling all your dependencies. This is easy on Linux where you can use system packages but awkward on other platforms. Most of those do not have a package manager at all. This has been worked around by having third party package managers. They are not really a solution for end user deployment, because you can't tell them to install a package manager just to use your app. On these platforms you must produce self-contained applications.

The traditional approach to this has been to bundle dependencies inside your own project. Either as prebuilt libraries and headers or by embedding the source code inside your source tree and rewriting your build system to build them as part of your project.

This is both tedious and error prone because it is always done by hand. The Wrap dependency system of Meson aims to provide an automated way to do this.

How it works

Meson has a concept of subprojects.