I've been looking for ways to learn about the right way to manage a software project, and I've stumbled upon the following blog post. I've learned some of the things mentioned the hard way, others make sense, and yet others are still unclear to me.

To sum up, the author lists a bunch of features of a project and how much those features contribute to a project's 'suckiness' for a lack of a better term. You can find the full article here: http://spot.livejournal.com/308370.html

In particular, I don't understand the author's stance on bundling dependencies with your project. These are:

== Bundling ==

• Your source only comes with other code projects that it depends on [ +20 points of FAIL ]

  Why is this a problem, (especially given the last point)?

• If your source code cannot be built without first building the bundled code bits [ +10 points of FAIL ]

  Doesn't this necessarily have to be the case for software built against 3rd party libs? Your code needs that other code to be compiled into its library before the linker can work?

• If you have modified those other bundled code bits [ +40 points of FAIL ]

  If this is necessary for your project, then it naturally follows that you've bundled said code with yours. If you want to customize a build of some lib,say WxWidgets, you'll have to edit that projects build scripts to bulid the library that you want. Subsequently, you'll have to publish those changes to people who wish to build your code, so why not use a high level make script with the params already written in, and distribute that? Furthermore, (especially in a windows env) if your code base is dependent on a particular version of a lib (that you also need to custom compile for your project) wouldn't it be easier to give the user the code yourself (because in this case, it is unlikely that the user will already have the correct version installed)?

So how would you respond to these comments, and what points may I be failing to take into consideration? Would you agree or disagree with the author's take (or mine), and why?