How do you not bundle dependencies programming in anything? If you want to be portable across Linuxes, you can't even count on tcsh or env being installed at the same path. Counting on the stuff installed with the system unleashes a world of pain on the user.
>you can't even count on tcsh or env being installed at the same path
This is what tools like Autoconf and pkg-config take care of. Lots of people use them to discover executables and libraries and generate files with the right machine-specific variables in them. You should never assume that binaries are in /usr/bin or that libraries are in /usr/lib. A lot of packaging issues are caused by such assumptions.
If you use the right tools, you don't have to bundle your dependencies. Bundling introduces a serious maintenance burden onto the developers and the packagers. It's easy to avoid bundling for C libraries and things, but with the prevalence of language-specific package managers, it's become a harder problem because everyone just assumes that you will fetch dependencies through it and never use the system package manager. It's a sad state.
Yes, but many of us have no intention of being portable across Linuxes. Our software is designed to be deployed to machines we control. If users want to deploy it to some other distro, they're free to package it themselves.
