any use to build from source?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-06-18 20:38, Patrick Useldinger <pu at vo.lu> wrote:
>
> So, my question is basically: did you, in your experience, find that
> compiling from source *really* has any serious advantages that make up
> for the time it takes?

Before I answer to this question, I cannot help noting that you don't
*HAVE* to compile everything from source.  In fact, if you install a
RELEASE version of FreeBSD and use pkg_add to install the binary,
precompiled packages of just the applications you are going to
use... there is absolutely no need to rebuild anything from source.

Well, at least, you are not obliged to.

Now, some of us -- actually, I feel that this is a large percentage of
the FreeBSD users, if the amount of questions posted here on this list
is of any significance at all -- a great percentage of us likes trimming
our installations; we like building our packages with the exact options
and feature sets that *we* prefer.  In such cases, having the ability to
build from source is absolutely marvelous.

IMHO, compiling a program to include _exactly_ the parts that you want
it to have is incomparably better than loading up a large 'framework'
and hooking into it with prebuilt modules at runtime.

- Giorgos