[wplug] Compiler questions

[Jonathan S Billings]

Bill Moran wrote:
> Reasons for compiling your own apps:
> 1) You get to review the code to ensure it isn't doing anything nasty.
> 2) You can easily tweak the code if you don't like how it behaves.
> 3) Aside from compiler optimizations, most software has a number of
>    compile-time options you can tweak (not all related to performance)
>    For example, I just recompiled Sylpheed with GnuPG support.
> 4) Generally, source becomes available prior to binary packages, so
>    you can (usually) stay more up to date by compiling your own than
>    by waiting for someone to roll binary packages.
> 5) Sometimes you can make software work by compiling from source and
>    telling it the non-standard locations of libraries that would
>    be otherwise unusable unless you upgraded a lot of other things
>    and went through a lot of headaches.
> 6) If a security patch is released and you have source, you can patch
>    and rebuild and fix the security hole very quickly.
> 7) Of course, there's compiler optimizations.

My opinion and experience lead me to think that of all these reasons, 
most users only take advantage of 4 and 7, and let the OS do the 
automatic build and install of new software packages.  Also, FreeBSD 
doesn't often have cutting-edge software, it's usually vetted for a 
while before hitting the majority of users.

I'd also like to point out that source-based distros do not scale well 
at all, and can introduce strange problems into maintaining the 
infrastructure.  It can work if you build the software once and deploy 
it to many systems.

Most linux/*bsd users can't build software from scratch, and if they 
want to, they need step-by-step instructions for the process or some 
tool (like portupgrade) to do it for them.  I don't think they're all 
incompetent, but not everyone is interested in figuring out Makefiles or 
finding bugs in autoconf-generated files.  That's why package-based 
distros are so popular, particularly in businesses.

-- 
Jonathan S. Billings <billings at negate.org>