I recently learned that Debian based distros essentially have a fixed collection of communal dependencies and libraries which any application installed through a package manager is required to use.
Contrast this against say, Windows, where I believe each application typically provides its own dependencies - and therefore a Windows OS installation will have instances of the same dependencies/libraries installed many times and each application will need to manage the updating of these dependencies on its own.
I know some developers develop their software to be compatible with the APT package manager, but I imagine there must be many applications where the developers have created the software in the "Windows" way.
So my question is, if the upstream developers created their software with the intention to distribute a large monolithic install complete with bundled dependencies, do the APT package maintainers need to rewrite the source so that the software uses the communal collection of dependencies rather than the local dependencies?
If so, does this occur often and is this a major task for package maintainers?