On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 13:58:15 -0800 Nano Nano <40101.nospam@comcast.net> wrote: > It's hard but only "first order hard" -- just keep plodding and you'll > get it. See, the reason I like Debian is that it handles "first order hard" for me. What's the point of doing it by hand? Some projects teach you something - compile and configure, for example, Sendmail/SMTP Auth/Cyrus by hand and you're gonna learn a lot about authentication and mail handling. Compile mplayer with all the extras by hand and you're just going to spend a lot of time hunting down codecs and support packages, and then dealing with variations in the way they were packaged. The first codec/package may be instructive, but doing it 20 times over with minor but irritating variations is not my idea of a learning experience. > And I like to do it from source so I know it's optimal. Do you actually understand what all the various compile-time options are, and why you may or may not want them? For probably 99% of users, the basic options in premade packages are all they need. If you're in that 1% left over, then by all means compile away. It's nice to have the power if you need it, but silly to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. -- Todd Pytel ---------------------------------------- Signature attached PGP Key ID 77B1C00C
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