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Should You Pre-Compile Binaries or Roll Your Own?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the home-rolled-happiness dept.

Jane Walker writes "The completion of pre-compiled packages and maximizing machine performance are two powerful incentives for Windows admins to use Linux and compile an OSS package." TechTarget has an article taking a look at some of the "why" behind rolling your own. What preferences have other Slashdot users developed, and why?

1 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gentoo? by stevey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The story, and comment, is almost certain to generate a flamefest. So I'll get in early.

    I'm a Debian user, and there are three things I know about gentoo:

    • The distro is based around compiling from source, which many suggest gives a huge speedup.
    • They have some neat tools for working with file merging conflicts in /etc, which sometimes happen when upgrading.
    • They make use of "USE" flags which can disable parts of programs you don't want/need.

    As for the first I think that compiling from source may well give you a speedup. But when my computer is setting with me at the desktop/ssh session very few processes are running and the network latency / my thinking time are most likely to be the biggest source of delays.

    True for heavily loaded servers the compilation might give you a boost but I'd be suprised if it was significant.

    Next we have USE flags. These do strike me as an insanely useful thing. But I have one niggling little doubt: I suspect they only work for code that supports it. e.g. project foo has optional support for libbar. If the upstream/original code doesn't have a feature marked as optional I don't imagine the Gentoo people would rework it to strip it out.

    So the ability to remove things from the source must be neutered, right?

    Finally the merging of configuration files in /etc seems useful. But I wonder if this is the correct approach. My distribution of choice, Debian, already does its utmost to preserve all configuration file changes automagically. I find it hard to understand what Gentoo does differently which makes it better.

    Ultimately I guess there are pros and cons to source based distributions depending on your needs. But one thing is true: If you're building from source and making use of modified USE flags and compiler flags then changes are you're the only person in the planet with a particular setup - that means bug reports are hard to manage.

    Theres a great deal to be said from having a thousand machines running identical binaries when it comes to tracking down bugs. (Sure diversity is good, especially for security, but there comes a point where maybe people take it a little bit too far).

    ObDisclaimer: I'm happy to be educated about Gentoo, but be gentle with me, k?