Comment by Good4boothee
3 days ago
> Linux defaults (GCC, automake, system libraries)
Last time I tried Gentoo desktop I ended up with 8 separate autotools versions, and gcc & glibc was not that far behind in count. And just like in https://xkcd.com/927/ every C developer tries to improve the situation by creating another build system.
> Last time I tried Gentoo desktop I ended up with 8 separate autotools versions, and gcc & glibc was not that far behind in count.
When was this?
AFAIK, you simply can't end up with more than one glibc version as that package hasn't had multiple Slots. [0] GCC is Slotted but I can't remember a time when there were more than three or four Slots defined for it. IME, it's rare for a package to declare an upper bound on GCC version, but it does happen. It's definitely true that there are many Slots for the various autotools tools.
[0] A "Slot" defines a particular subset of package versions that can be installed alongside other "Slots" of the same package. For example, every sys-kernel/gentoo-sources version has its own Slot, every minor version of dev-lang/python [1] has its own Slot, etc, etc, etc.
[1] ...that is, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11...
This is also why I stopped using Gentoo. I used it regularly from 2004-2005 (which I admit was a very long time ago now) on my graphite G4, because support was very good for PowerPC. But then one day emerge suggested I update glibc. I don’t know if I botched the update or if it really was suggested in error, but I was just starting my studies in CS so I did not know what that particular “library” did and said yes. The update must have included an ABI change. Not surprisingly, the machine did not come back up after a reboot.
Gentoo was fun while it lasted (fluxbox user here!). I decided that MacOS X wasn’t so bad after all after that.