While it kinda flies under the radar, most modern C projects do have a kind of package management solution in the form of pkg-config. Instead of the wild west of downloading and installing every dependency and figuring out how to integrate it properly with the OS and your project you can add a bit of syntactic sugar to your Makefile and have that mostly handled for you, save for the part where you will need to use your platform's native package manager to install the dependencies first. On a modern system using a package on a C project just requires a Makefile that looks something like this:
