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Re: gEDA-user: On the nitty-gritty of user-experienced problems
Karel Kulhavy wrote:
binary package is a security hole. Someone can put a malicious code
into the binary and noone will notice.
Unless you read every line of source code in a package every time you
download it, the same applies. Actually, running the binary is a little
less risky. You generally don't run the program as root, but if you
compile from source you have to do 'make install' as root. Those
install scripts can do just about anything to a system.
Malicious code in a source code is obvious.
Really? I guarantee you that any programmer worth his salary could hide
a backdoor in some source code that would be very difficult to find.
Binary packages run slower because are not optimized for the particular
processor. I have notices about 2 times speedup between compiled GCC
and binary GCC. I don't want to buy 3.6GHz system. I'll stick with
my 1.8GHz one.
The difference is not perceptible, except in multimedia-intensive
applications. I am willing to bet that the reason your compiled GCC is
faster is simply because it's a different version.
Tried various distros, it was always disaster.
I never had any major problems with my distro (Mandrake). Of course,
the best way to muck up any Linux installation is by carelessly
installing different libraries, as you seem to be fond of doing. If you
stick to distribution-provided core packages, you will be fine.
Programs should be written portably. They should work regardless of
any distros.
In an ideal world, programs would just work. In reality, there is no
way every distribution can be reliably supported -- they are far too
different. The best idea is to use something like the Linux Standards
Base. If your distribution is LSB-compliant, it should run
LSB-compliant programs without any issues. Making programs run only on
LSB-compliant distros will encourage non-compliant ones to standardize,
which is a good thing.
-- Igor