Ubuntu first time

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| I hate the ports system.  It is what I think is wrong with Gentoo too.
| Why the heck should every person be grabbing things from source when
| the same binary could have been generated once already.  It is inefficient
| waste of resources.  Compiling from source should be a last resort,
| not the norm.

Not to take away from your main point, but compiling from source ought
to be a lot cheaper than it is.  For some reason we've made our build
systems ridiculously cumbersome.

The autoconf etc. crap is one big culprit.  Another is overly
intricate header files.  There are layers of this crud.

The wizard Fabrice Bellard demonstrated some of this in his amazing
TCCBOOT hack
<http://news.slashdot.org/story/04/10/25/2245259/TCCBOOT-Compiles-And-Boots-Linux-In-15-Seconds>

The original Pascal compiler didn't bother producing binaries since
compiling was about as fast as loading binaries (circa 1970).  But
then it didn't have a good system for modular programs.
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