[wplug] Building vs. RPMs?

[Douglas Green]

Thank you!!
-D

On Jan 19, 2006, at 10:04 PM, Bill Moran wrote:

> 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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