I have a C project using autotools and make to build my project. I need to use code that as far as I can tell is only available on github. What is the best practice for including this code in my project? How would I do it?
The best I can think of is to probably use Git Submodules so that you bundle your dependencies with your repository without having them to be inside your repository. This will provide you with 2 advantages, your library dependency will always be (latest), your git repository won't be bloated of all the unnecessary data and objects that the library would have brought. Make sure to build with the lib and to query the user if he does not have it on his system.
C does not have any native dependency manager.
If any tool could do something like you want and for basically anything, you could look into Conda