C app deployment and managing dependencies in c - c

Question

I'm new to c development, but I have some experience in other modern languages .so the first thing that I found hard is dependencies and deployment, while we got Gradle, maven, NuGet and pipy and... but in c I find it a bit difficult to manage this process.
for example, I have an app that should use mongo-c-library, log4c,libarchive so basically, in my development environment, I download and unzip all of the tar files of the above libraries and then followed their instruction(usually some make stuff) and installed them in order to include them in code make the code work.
I have studied a bit about CMake but I couldn't get a clear picture of how that could actually solve the problem.
at this moment my best solution is to create an install bash script and zip all dependencies unzipped folder with that install script and then send it to the production server to deploy it.
1.The first question is : is it possible to just copy and past all of .so .h and etc files in /path/of/installed/dependencies/include
and /path/of/installed/dependencies/lib in the destination server libary path.
2.if not what is the faster way?
while I was surfing the CMake source file I found that its developers just use this package source code directly.
cmxxx contains the xxx sources and headers files.
3.how can apt-get and Linux package manager help in the deployment process?
2 first question was more about dependencies. imagine we have a simple c app and we want to install(build and make a useable executable file) quickly. how it can be related to .deb packages.

Answer 1

1.The first question is : is it possible to just copy and past all of .so .h and etc files in /path/of/installed/dependencies/include and /path/of/installed/dependencies/lib in the destination server libary path.
Yes, technically it's possible. That's essentially what package managers do under the hood. However, doing that is a colossal mistake and screams bad practices. If that's what you want then in the very least you should look into package managers to build up your own installer, which handles this sort of stuff already for you.
2.if not what is the faster way?
You're actually asking an entirely different question, which is: how should I distribute my code, and how do I expect users to use/deploy it?
If you want users to access your source code and build it locally, as you've mentioned cmake then you just to set up your project right as cmake already supports that usecase.
If instead you just want to distribute binaries for a platform then you'll need to build and package that code. Again, cmake can also help you on that one, as cmake's cpack supports generating some types of packages like DEB packages used by Debian and Ubuntu, and which are handled by apt.
3.how can apt-get and Linux package manager help in the deployment process?
apt is designed to download and install packages from a repository.
Under the hood, apt uses DEB packages, which can be installed with dpkg.
If you're targeting a system that uses apt/deb, you can build DEB packages whenever you release a version to allow people to install their software.
You can also go a step beyond and release your DEB packages in a Personal Package Archive.

Answer 2

You would typically NOT download and install source packages. Instead you should generally rely on the libraries and development packages of the distribution. When building your own package you would typically just reference the packages or files that your package is dependent on. Then you build your own package and you're done. Upon installation of your package, all dependencies will automatically be resolved in an appropriate order.
What exactly needs to be done is dependent on the package management system, but generally the above statements apply. Be advised, package management apparently is pretty hard, because so many 3rd party developers screw it up.