Compiling on recent (2017) distros - GCC 6.x issues

[Commander_X]

It's hard to have a clear picture of what exactly you are doing in this endeavor,
(and perhaps it's better this way, for my sanity and for the time when the SWAT will break into your computer room) ,

Hah, you made my day (made me remember of this friend of mine that was putting on the window blinds each time he was opening his computer case)
If it helps sharpening the image, a quick explanation is that I'm not really engineering the build environment, just trying to get it working to a ... decent extent. By decent I mean something stable enough (but not more than that).

Slackware is about building your way from the ground up.

I think that's Gentoo.
Although Slackware makes it really easy to do the same, I don't think that's the main treat it's used for.

The only thing that I remember is that at one point in time, when I automatically upgraded (double facepalm) the OOLDE environment, these two libraries

• libplds4.so.0d
• libplc4.so.0d

appeared in the Oolite for Linux dependencies. Some library change that I don't know (?!?) brought these new dependencies into the picture.
I emphasize, to highlight on what is happening when you decide to go with a different library set.

Preaching to the choir here -- as I've been saying, one safe reason to stick with Slackware.

[Getafix]

The discussion on "Which Linux vs Windows for Web Server?" has been split in the "Outworld" forum with a relevant topic title.
The new topic link is https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18987