apache 1.3.26?

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Paul J. Lucas wrote:
>There are no "gotcha's" in building from source.  If somebody is a
>sysadmin and can't build Apache from source, s/he should be fired for
>being incompetent.

 I agree with Paul 100%. If you are going to run a real server, you should
learn to compile these things from source. There are *many* more benefits
from doing this than any you would get with an RPM.

 When you use RPMs you get the following:

 1) Something else that keeps track of your packages for you.

 When you compile from source you get the following:

 1) Faster patches/fixes and this case is a perfect example. There are
people on this list looking for a good RPM, when it took me less than 1/2
hour to patch and recompile for 7 production servers.

 2) You get the software configured the way *you* want/need. Often this
means leaner software as RPMs will try to be as inclusive as possible and
add in every option. When there are conflicting options, you have to hope
that your RPM has the one you need.

 3) You can modify the code should you need to. An example: We couldn't
use HtDig out of the box for our needs, but it took about 20 minutes of
looking through the code and a simple change so that it would work with
our system. You can't do this with an RPM.

 4) Something better that keeps track of your packages -- you!

 Remember, the cool thing about open source is 'Free as in Freedom', not
'Free as in Beer'.

  http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/

 If you are telling people to only use RPMs, they're restricted to Beer,
which, as many of us know, can lead to headaches like this.

Cheers,

Chris

-- 

Christopher Murtagh
Webmaster / Sysadmin
Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Tel.: (514) 398-3122
Fax:  (514) 398-2017