Debian - Apache help

[Anthony de Boer]

Andrew Hammond wrote:
> Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
>  ... There are situations where compiling from 
> scratch is an unavoidable necessity. They are few and far between.
> 
> > I see no big advantage of installing packages 
> > over compiling from source code.
> 
> Then clearly your experience is limited to running a hobby box or 
> possibly admining a toy system. Anyone who considers their time valuable 
> knows the advantages of pre-compiled binaries. ...

*Most* of the time you can get away with a distro's prebuilt binaries.
Inevitably you run up to the point that it isn't all the time.

The most important exception I've run into is with build-time options. 
Old-school software developers will have config options, or files you
have to edit before doing a "make", and various choices get linked into
the binary you're building.  The new-school ideal (which would pertain to
the Linux-distro era; commercial software will have already dealt with
this, but opensource didn't have to in the good old days) is to read
everything from runtime config files and be able to do one-size-fits-all
binaries with no embedded configuration choices.  However, inevitably
you're going to run into an old-school project whose binary packager
made decisions you're now regretting, and you have to rebuild.  The
last time I ran into this was only a year or so ago, and involved Squid
support for all-in-memory-don't-touch-disk caching and for larger numbers
of file descriptors not being enabled in the RH9 RPM.

There's also the case of key packages one's business model is built
around; you want to keep a weather eye to the developers' list for it,
and probably at least look at how your packager is doing it up for your
distro, though hopefully all runs smoothly and you don't have to rebuild
anything.

Finally, there's the case of people not wanting to upgrade eg. an RH5 box
long past its best-before date, due to various entanglements, and since
nobody else wants to support it, one ends up having to build one's own
RPMs of any security patches one needs.

> Jack of all trades, master of none?

That's the core sysadmin conundrum; you have to be a journeyman at
everything from coding to software building to router config to cabling
to UPS-battery changing to dealing with telcos to political infighting;
you have to keep your head above water in too many places at once.  Being
a journeyman means being competent at what you're doing, and is nothing
to apologize for, but can be frustrating when you feel that you have it
in you to be a master at something if you could just offload the rest and
focus on one thing.  But then you run into masters who are wizardly at
one thing and shockingly ignorant of something else that you've got
covered.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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