Every reasonably sized C++ project these days will use some third party libraries. Some of them like boost are viewed as extensions of the standard libraries that no sane developer would want to be without. Then there is whatever GUI toolkit your project uses, possibly another toolkit to deal with data access, the ACE libraries, etc etc. You get the picture.

Somehow, these third party libraries have to be integrated into your development and build process in such a way that they don’t become major stumbling blocks. I’ll discuss a few approaches that I have encountered in the multitude of projects I was part of, and will discuss both their advantages and problems.

I’ve blogged about a little elisp snippet I use to install my preferred base set of Emacs packages before. Thanks for all the feedback, it definitely helped improve the code.

One issue that kept annoying me is that there is no simple way to tell ELPA to mainly pull packages from melpa-stable and only fall back to melpa for those packages I can’t get on melpa-stable yet. I decided to extend my code to handle that situation with some manual inputs as I know which packages can’t be found on melpa-stable. It proved surprisingly easy to do so after mulling over the problem a little.