Re: pros/cons of installing from source

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Greg Folkert wrote:
On Thu, 2007-05-03 at 13:59 +0100, yag wrote:
Hi

I would like to know whether installing from source rather than
from the repositories has any advantage in terms of performance or
something else. I didn't notice any difference when comparing
mplayer's behavior, although compiling it myself gave me the choice
of fine tuning the available codecs as well as installing the very
latest version, for instance.

This is not Gentoo. Gentoo's vision of "maximum performance" is a great
effort, but in reality is far from optimal.

For every report of "Woot! Compiling from source kicks ***. Why didn't
I do this earlier", I can find 1 that disagrees with you and 1 that says
"maybe it is worth it for max performance, but WOW, 196 hours to get a
workable complete system, I'm not so sure"

The statistics I find important are the massive amount of testing some
have done (I leave that upto the reader to find, should you need help
finding it, please ask the list to help find it). These people have done
installs of LFS/Gentoo and other source distributions and "highly
optimized" the compilation process. Following multiple "best guides" to
compile by. In the end, it really depends on WHAT you want to
accomplish.

Given that most of the things that "typically matter" like word
processing and surfing the internet and listening to music... playing
cards, etc. I would hazard to say that:

No it is not worth the time and effort to "install from source"

The reason I say this, is even if you get 1%-5% improvement in
performance, are you really going to see (really and truly "feel") it?
The answer is: no.

Now, if you are doing nothing but ripping DVD or encoding MPEG files or
doing full CGI animation renderings which sometimes take WEEKS to finish
the sequence, then even 1% improvement may in fact be worth it. But then
again, recompiling everything takes a very high amount of time and then
you are just competing for processor time from the "rendering". In
business terms it would be cheaper to just ad a few more machines.

One last point, if compiling from source is so great, why does Gentoo
supply pre-compiled binaries for about 95% of the available packages
that can be emerge'd on any one system? The answer is: Because compiling
take a very long time and people are impatient. They want Gentoo for the
"elitism" aspect of Gentoo, but none of the waiting.

So, in summary, there are a few situations where compiling from source
is desirable. But in general, you will not notice the difference. The
only thing you will have done is add to the eventual heat death of the
universe.

Exactly the point I was trying to make, but you said much better than I
did. Greg, you really are an eloquent GNU/Linux guru. Kudos.

Joe

- --
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