Source or Packages?

LordShryku

A new slashdot article poses the question: Do you prefer to build from source or use packages?
Wondering the same from all of you. When you install, which do you prefer?
Personally, I'm a build from source man. Gives me more control over the application....

piersk

package management. I use Debian. I can't be arsed with faffing around with source. i wanna get on and develop man!

dalecosp

LordS, shame on you!!

Ports, man, ports ... best of both worlds on FreeBSD!!

goldbug

Depends on which machine/OS I'm working on.

Gentoo boxen: source, obviously
FreeBSD boxen: source (ports + my own scripts for php, apache, mysql)
Windows boxen (work): packages (duh)
OS X: packages unless it's not available native... then I Fink it.

swr

I use packages for most stuff, but for really important things (like PHP) I build from source.

Best of both worlds, really.

Moonglobe

i go from source wherever possible. Slackware's pkg managment isn't very good imo, and i don't change much anyways.

LordShryku

Hrmmm....I did leave you BSD boys out in the cold, didn't I? :p

Using Red Hat, the latest rpm package is never anywhere near the latest actual release(at least in PHP/Apache terms), so I always just went from source. Just seems like the natural thing for me now...