On Jul 8, 2004, at 2:06 PM, Marco Comini wrote:Sorry but this doesn't make sense to me... why should I even compile on my system then? If binaries are all the same on any system then I shouldn't even bother to waste time compiling. Just get someone else's binaries. Then I can uninstall fink right now and just use apt.
By compiling from source, you get more recent packages. We only release bindists periodically, but .info files are updated a lot faster than that.
If I'm so lucky to get the sources of software I need then I would expect to compile the best/fasted binaries that I can have running on my Mac. I've discovered that I don't have G5 native binaries after all this time just because I was assuming it had to work this way, I hadn't had the slightest doubt about the contrary.... is mine just a naive expectation (or naive way of thinking)?
What's the point in working the actual way? Is it technical or "political"?
Politicial (sort of).
And also technical. Before we release a package, we want to test it to guarantee that it works. What good is a distribution of non-working software? If we have one set of compiler options that works on any machine, then we can compile our packages with that set of options, test them on our machines, and be done. If we allow any set of options, then we'd need to test them all before we could say "this package works". More than that, we'd need to test them on various machines (G3, G4, G5) under various OSes (10.2, 10.3), and in interaction with other packages compiled with different options (eg does package X (compiled -fast) work when linked with library Y (compiled -g -O). This is needed because someone might install packages from the bindist then compile some of their own ). As you can see, this leads to a combinatorial explosion in the number of tests we have to do, just to guarantee that we're distributing working software. We're a small group of volunteers. We don't have the time to do that much testing, nor do we have the resources. So, we give our blessing to packages compiled with a set of options that we can test. This is a fink "official package". If you want to modify your installation of fink so that it compiles them differently, go ahead. However if something breaks, you're in uncharted waters, and we will not help.
regards, crh
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