newRPL - build 1255 released! [updated to 1299]

[Claudio L.]

(01-02-2018 02:07 PM)TheKaneB Wrote:  well, it depends on your needs about the VM. When I worked on videogames (the toolchains are practically identical to those of the embedded platforms) I used to lock myself into a specific set of libraries and tools and I wouldn't upgrade anything unless it was specifically needed for a toolchain update (which would mean once every 2-3 years).

I have a similar approach now, even if I've switched to web/mobile, but of course I use LTS distros and I only install security patches, so all my VMs last at least 2 years.

If you treat your VM just as a build machine, you won't need to upgrade as often as your main workstation.

That's ideal and I do that myself for development too. I actually moved my main development to Linux LTS because of Windows 10 forced updates. That works for development but not so much for distribution, it forces you to ship every dependency with your final product. On a videogame, it doesn't matter since it's a large size product anyway, but on a small package it's a lot of bloating.
I started researching some package managers to do just that, but it's quite cumbersome and pulls a lot of dependencies. Maintaining a package (deb , rpm, etc.) would force to rebuild against whatever versions are going to be included on every distro out there. It's fine if the distribution takes care of pulling, updating and building your package, but in the meanwhile, I'd be building packages for every distro, which is way too much effort.

So the only real solution I found is to have people build from source in the easiest possible way, on as many systems as possible, but it's far from ideal.