Glyph@miss_rodent Multiple distros means multiple platforms. Multiple platforms means multiple dev targets. Multiple dev targets means that developing for "Linux" is, at minimum, *many dozens of times more expensive* than developing for macOS, or Windows, or the web.
Cassandrich@glyph @miss_rodent Multiple platforms are only multiple dev targets if you're in a 1980s-mindset of #ifdef hell everywhere. If instead you write portable code to the specs not to "works on my machine", and probe for things rather than enumerating a million build combinatorics, supporting a multitude of different systems is not any harder than supporting one.
@dalias @miss_rodent spoken like a Java marketing executive from 2002. it will definitely be cool if this ever happens but after 30 years of waiting for it to materialize, I think we can call the experiment a failure
@glyph @miss_rodent It does work. This is why basically everything that was originally written for GNU/Linux compiles out of the box without problem on Alpine with musl. It was sometimes hard work fixing old bad practices people were stuck on, but now everyone benefits. And it HURTS when somebody wants to tear that up.
LisPi@dalias @glyph @miss_rodent Common Lisp also has a similar approach, the *features* variable's content is to be considered dynamically regardless of whether a given implementation hard compiles some of them.
Cross-implementation portability across architectures tends to work pretty well.
@dalias @miss_rodent I think you are talking about a different layer of the stack than I am. I have no interest in tearing up good build or portability hygiene. but the fact remains that one remaining bad practice is assuming that you can test software on one platform and then assume it works on others. case in point: source compat is nice, but stuff *built* against glibc ***very much*** does not *run* on musl or vice versa
@dalias @glyph @miss_rodent Dynamic probing also means we can eventually (in a perfect world) kill the build and just have portable code always and (almost) purely source-based distributions.
(You do technically need a binary bootstrap seed at some point. The oldschool option for this probably would be physical switches on a (large) machine for the user to set.)
I believe the popular term for dynamic probing and feature discovery is monkey patching.