On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 08:25:56AM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
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.
You really believe this? If so, why do you bother with CentOS, or any package managed distro? Native builds are *never* the way to go, but I quite refuse to waste my time pointing out the many drawbacks of such compared to taking a few moments to properly - yes, *properly* - make SRPMs and and rebuilding *those* on the target platforms.
The "gold standard" is that procedure, not building source kits that can, and *will* walk all over the rest of your system. Just because it may not have happened yet is nothing but pure luck.
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?
Some quality control? Really? I can see this discussion is going no where and you have your mind made up.
John