Should You Pre-Compile Binaries or Roll Your Own?

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?

Comments

Re:Gentoo?

[Tony Hoyle]

I gave up on gentoo fundamentally because of its *lack* of control.

The problem is the USE flags are global.. you can override them for an individual package but that doesn't get recorded anywhere - on the next emerge world it'll happily forget all your carefully crafted options and reinstall with its global defaults.

The killer for me with lynx. Most distros have a minimal lynx that works in text mode. By default the gentoo one is dependent on X, about a million fonts, etc. You can override that on the command line using a local USE flagbut what happens at the next update? Your nice small lynx that you need for diagnostics, single user boots etc. is replaced with a graphical behemoth that's almost useless for that task.

I found that happening so much in gentoo I just gave up on it (the small fact that some of the stuff I needed had compile errors didn't help either).