As stated on the IRC, I played a bit with Conan. As it turns out, it is a really nice addition to CMake (which is what it supports best): One could ship a source package that pulls, builds and uses all dependencies one could ever need, even on systems with no own package manager. Not bad, really.

I migrated the ymarks server from my own build script with a large directory of dependencies, dynamically adding cJSON and SQLite3 - and it works just fine. Awesome, really.

The only third-party library still shipped is a header-only web server which isn’t in Conan. It does not have to - one more file is acceptable to me. :)