Comment by delta_p_delta_x
3 days ago
Fair response.
I singled it out because I've been badly burnt by it in the past, and I dislike how it works compared to Win32. Back-targeting old glibc from newer (a very common case because developers tend to have newer distros than their users), requires either changes in source code (not build code, which is where it ought to be) to explicitly pin versions, or the ridiculousness of firing up an entire Docker container just for old glibc. It has regularly caused issues for things like Steam on Linux.
If you build on random developer's machines rather than a unified build environment you've already failed at so many things that the glibc problem is certainly not your biggest concern.
Regardless it's still a PITA to maintain an ancient distro as a build environment and the alternatives are hacky. It might be the best of the linux libraries but it's still not good.
No need if you are targeting a current linux distro. You only need to do that if you are targeting the ancient distro, in which case you need it around to actually test your software on it as well.