[CentOS] Ganglia

[Whit Blauvelt]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 08:10:29PM -0500, John R. Dennison wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 08:01:02PM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> > 
> > That being said, it's trivial to recompile the F13 RPM for 3.1.2 for 
> > centos-5.
> 
> 	And that would be the proper route to go instead of building
> 	from native source :)

To get 3.1.7? Disregarding that, I should jump through the hoops of
recompiling a F13 RPM rather than just compile from the tar? Why? Every
extra stage like that introduces the chance of incidental errors, of stuff
that doesn't translate precisely through that stage. I'm not doubting it
generally can work, just that there's anything "proper" about it. Generally
native source is the gold standard. The farther upstream you go, the better
the quality gets, the more bugs are fixed, and the more control you have
over how and where the stuff installs on your systems. 

There can be an argument that for some stuff that passes through RHEL the
extra attention adds some quality control (ignoring the counterexample of
the long history of RH manging kernels; they seem to have gotten better
about that lately), but stuff in EPEL? Really?

I'm not talking Linux from Scratch here - although I respect that project
immensely. I appreciate a solid distro as a foundation. CentOS is. But
claims that any distro is so perfect and complete that it's "improper" to
custom compile a few apps on its foundation - from the "native" source (with
all the connotations that "natives" are scarey and primitive) - should not
be well received if we want to continue to have open platforms.

Best,
Whit