On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:25:18 +0000, Invisible wrote:

>>>   "When you want to install new software, you have to always compile
>>>   it
>>> from sources."
>> 
>> I would say that this latter comes from a combination of very early
>> Slack and LFS rather than Gentoo.  Gentoo is the most popular distro
>> that uses that as a package management system today, but the history of
>> "build from source" goes back farther than Gentoo.
> 
> Again, this is The Unix Way(tm). That's why every Unix always comes with
> a C compiler (not to mention autoconf). It's because every Unix is
> slightly different, so while you can usually write a program that works
> on every Unix, you're going to have to recompile it for each one...

Simply not true.  Even in college back in the early 90's, most of the 
software that was installed on our Sun systems was precompiled binaries, 
not built from source.

Jim

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