Per-project third party library management

["Henrik Härkönen" <heharkon@gmail.com>]

What would be the most convenient way to manage ( mostly install & upgrade) a third party library for one's project?

With python projects I'd probably fire up an virtualenv per project and install stuff there with pip etc. With scala I'd use SBT to handle the libraries. In my C development days, we had a proprietary RTOS with all of it's dependencies managed by someone else, so I didn't have to (or get to learn) worry about those personally... :(

As I've understood, Ada doesn't have such a package distribution system, so one would typically download sources, compile and install the library through it's make system. Or install readily packaged version of the library, for example with apt-get etc.

So far, I've installed AWS from source and Ahven from a DEB package, and as such they are just fine methods. But both were using root access and system wide install.

What I'm aiming for with my question, is to learn a way to install a library so that it would not require root access and it would be more tied to the project. 

Different projects might need to use different versions etc.

Should I use GNU Stow, or configure --prefix to point somewhere under my project tree and have gprbuild include it from there, or...?

My apologies if this has been asked a lot, but at least I didn't find that many directly related discussions about this.

-Henrik