I remember back in '99 when Todd Michael Greer wrote:
> One of the reasons the distros exist is so that you can have a good OS
> without having to compile everything yourself. Sure I could compile it
> myself, but if RedHat (or Debian, or whoever I choose to trust) is willing
> to do it for me, I can be doing something else instead. Compiling isn't
> generally painful, but it's not particularly fun either.
Yeah. Witness my trying to get Gnome 0.99.something to compile on
Solaris. It's not so much that any one package is bad, but that
there are about 3-4 dozen you have to do! Easy to get lost in
the middle (or my case, stymied by one lib that wouldn't install
(ORBit)). Not to mention that they say a full source compile
of Gnome needs ~700 mb of scratch space. Yek.
OTOH, compiles today are very straightforward, as a rule. Do NOT
underestimate the impact of 1) GNU tools in general 2) gcc &
autoconf in specific. Ahh autoconf. How I love you!
Matt
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