You're the only one trying to play with definitions of "standard" here. The system package manager was the standard packaging method for extra functionality on Linux (and other) systems regardless of implementation language before perl/Python/etc. started coming up with their own. You might argue that it's a bad standard, that it doesn't work for more "nimble" languages, whatever, but it is how C++ code is supposed to be packaged and has been for a long time. What C++ doesn't have is an exclusive package manager that can't be used with other languages. Non-exclusivity doesn't make anything less standard. Quite the contrary.