[taeric]

But why couldn't you just use 1.2, is the question?

I've been bit by this style thing plenty of times. Just recently, I started a python project and used 3.11, only to realize I was targeting AWS Lambda and at the time 3.9 was the best they offered. I could have tried maintaining two versions and worked around that, or I could change completely to 3.9. (Now 3.10)

Did I lose on some things? Yeah, the switch stuff, in particular. That said, it was far preferable to a complicated build chain that tried to support both.

[saidinesh5]

It was a decade ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy on this.. but that's one of the commits I shared above. Trying to force it to use 1.2. But there was a Gentoo user who ran into issues with that and i had to revert it.

But you do see the problem right? How distros end up creating this weird situation of certain libraries not being available in certain places. They won't even let you statically link your program to those libraries to it into their repositories. It was easier to just give up.

[taeric]

This isn't really a "distros" problem as it is a "dependencies are hard" one. Having many targets for deployment makes it visible, but just look at the complexity of targeting all browsers to see how it is dealt with for ostensibly simpler requirements.