Joshua Gimer wrote:
then why are you using RHEL/CentOS at all? Why not a source based distro like Gentoo ?
Becuase I am not the one that is paying for the support contract with RH. IF it was up to me I would run everything on OpenBSD; but it is not.
I know valuable people who use (netbsd) pkgsrc on centos, so you could try that if you want...
There is no problem installing software from source, provided that you automate the build and the installation procedures. of course, you can have compilers and -devel packages on all your machines, and build on every machine, but besides being counter productive, this is somewhat too far from a "minimalist" approach (only install software you need).
one approach is to build rpms on a build machine and install them on the other machines.