On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Whit Blauvelt whit@transpect.com wrote:
Sanity here is relative. If you go to the main support channels for stuff like Apache or PHP or Python or Postfix or whatever, and you're having trouble because of some bug that they fixed literally years ago, but which your distro of choice doesn't yet provide packaged, you'll find no patience for the "I'm not going to compile your current version because then my distro would be impure" excuse for not upgrading to fix the problem.
Not at all. I'm not saying ZOMG YOU MUST STAY WITH 5.1.6 FOR PHP!!!!!eleventy!1111
I'm simply saying that for most people, the configure make make install method of doing things can and likely will result in breakage. Either take the extra 5 minutes to make it into an rpm or stand on the shoulders of others who already have, like the IUS repo folks, or the epel repo folks, or the atrpms or rpmforge folks to get what you need. My gripe is not about keeping the distro pure (that's a whole separate issue), but simply keeping the package management overhead simple and in general line with the practices of the distro.
In any event, we're drifting pretty far from the initial nature of this thread, so I'd like to move that we either start a separate one for this sort of thing, or cease altogether. I'm mostly in favor of the latter.