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Comment by nly

3 days ago

As an ex-Gentoo user, the pain in a was always bundled Vs shared libraries.

Shared libraries breaking ABI could mean recompiling half your operating system

On the other hand, bundled libraries meant insanely long build times and a sense of impurity/uncleanliness

Unfortunately, it looks like projects like ABI tracker are long dead:

https://github.com/lvc/abi-tracker

Current Gentoo user here. This hasn't been a real issue for me in years.

  • Gentoo user since 2002 sounding off. I can't remember this being a problem in like five or ten years. Occasionally a library update will trigger rebuilds for a few packages, and revdep-rebuild hasn't actually had anything to do on my systems in years.

    I don't know if devs got much better at not making changes that break binary compatibility, [0] Portage (and friends) got better at figuring out the minimal set of packages to rebuild on library update, or what, but, yeah. That hasn't been a problem for me for quite a long time.

    [0] Perhaps the chucklefucks who would habitually be so careless and inconsiderate all moved to working in Javascript?