[dmuth]

This is one reason why whenever I build a new project, I build it inside of a Docker container.

That way, the project has just the dependencies it needs, and I know I can rebuild it at some point in the future and will be unlikely to run into problems when I do.

[Cu3PO42]

This works as long as your Dockerfile is reasonably reproducible and does its best to lock dependencies. However, this approach has failed me a couple of times in the past. For example, I rebuilt a container some weeks later, in the meantime a new version of clang had been released that just so happened to break my build due to a bug.

I personally use Nix these days, but the complexity is too high for me to recommend it to everyone for every software project.

[microtonal]

Yeah, Nix pretty much solves this problem. The other day I wanted to try a really old version of spaCy for fun/historic interest. spaCy 1.8.2 installed freshly from the binary cache on NixOS-unstable as if it was still April 2017.

[brokencube]

My first step now when trying to resurrect old projects is to create a Docker container for it - that way I can install any old versions of anything (like node or PHP) I need without having to worry about it polluting anything else on the system.