[wplug] Building vs. RPMs?

Bill Moran wmoran at potentialtech.com
Thu Jan 19 22:04:01 EST 2006


Douglas Green wrote:

> Is there any performance advantage to building a package from source  
> rather than installing a precompiled binary or RPM? In other words-  is 
> the package somehow more tailored to my system (and it's various  
> dependencies)??

It _can_.  Especially if you take the time to optimize your compiler
flags.  When you see different RPMs, some for i386 and some for i686,
you're looking at compiler optimizations.  The i686 rpms are built
with optimizations for Pentium class CPUs, and probably won't work
right (or at all) on 486-class hardware.  The i386 rpms are liable to
work on just about any Intel arch hardware you can find.

Beyond that, there are a lot of optimizations you can use, but knowing
exactly how to compile a fully optimized binary that will still run
reliably is a bit of a black art.  And it's not just compiler knowledge,
it's often knowing what to do with a particular program as well.

> My Googling didn't yield a good yes/no answer. RPMs  
> seem to land me in dependency hell pretty often...

You're unlikely to end up in any less hell by compiling from source.

Dependencies are simply part of open source.  The fact that so much code
is shared as libraries creates the problem.  Learning to work with it is
part of understanding how software works.


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