[wplug] Building vs. RPMs?

[Eric Cooper]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 09:56:02PM -0500, 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)??  My Googling didn't yield a good yes/no answer. RPMs
> seem to land me in dependency hell pretty often...

You can certainly tell GCC to do more architecture-specific
optimizations that way, and you can disable components of packages
that you don't need.  This might reduce dependencies in some cases,
but it's unlikely to get you out of dependency hell.  (For true
salvation, you need Debian's apt-get ...)

Arch-specific optimization is the whole premise behind Gentoo, for
example, but I don't think it's been supported very scientifically.
You'll find lots of subjective statements like "my system is much
faster" (for some value of "much").  There's probably an 80/20 rule at
work here, where tuning a few key packages gives you most of the
benefit.

On Debian, I compile my own kernel and install a slightly better
optimized version of the C library, and that's it.  But then, I don't
overclock my CPU or soup up my car, either.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u