So I've been working on migrating my primary server from Slackware 8.1 to Slackware 10.1 (a much-needed upgrade long overdue), and I think to myself, ok, I should be able to stick to using the precompiled binary packages for just about everything, and not build very much stuff from source. Building everything from source is kind of a pain, and I'd rather stick to the simplicity of Slackware's package management. Makes it easier to keep up to date with security patches too; I can just download the updated packages from the link in the slackware-security e-mail, run upgradepkg, and I'm done.

Well, then I start configuring things, setting everything up to work the way I want, and I run into something that I can't change via a run-time configuration file; I have to either modify the source code, or at least add some configure options. So I either remove the Slackware package and just build it from source, or I grab the source for the Slackware package from the fourth CD and modify the SlackBuild script. I get it working the way I wanted.

And then I step back and take a look at how many packages I've had to do this with: so far, Apache, Sendmail, PHP, imapd/ipop3d, and of course the Linux kernel. And I'm not done yet.

I must admit, this does make me rather curious as to how Slackware compares to other distributions. I know some of the compile-time options I wanted, other distros enable by default, where Slackware doesn't. I've always heard that when you build things from source, you run into dependency nightmares with the package management system. With RedHat you could just do the same thing that I've done for a few of these Slackware packages - hack the SRPM, then install it as normal. What about SuSE, Debian or Gentoo? Does compiling from source with customized options cause package management issues? I expect Gentoo shouldn't have any trouble as long as you just need to change the options, rather than modify the code itself, but what about things like UW imapd, which needs modifications to src/osdep/unix/env_unix.c to make it not completely suck?

Fun fun fun.