I've found most Lua libraries don't have any other dependencies.

Perhaps this is the reason I've found this approach work well with Lua. I've never tried it with other languages that I use, like Swift, Objective-C, C#.

I did work in a company in the past that used Nexus [0] for their dependencies across various platforms. Perhaps Nexus has some tooling build in to deal with transitive dependencies, not sure.

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[0]: https://www.sonatype.com/products/nexus-repository

It's forking all the way down. I run my code on a fork of Linux, just in case.