On Sun, 10 Jan 2016 20:37:10 +0000 Peter Garner ipad@petergarner.net wrote:
True, but compiling from source is more educational..
It's not, unless you apply some changes of your own to the source code.
If you don't, then it's just a difference between entering one set of commands (and waiting considerably more), vs entering another set of commands.
And if you meant "educational" as in useful for the future in a *nix system administration job, then nope, compiling random pieces of software from the source is not how you manage a park of servers (not to mention keep it up to date...). Not useful for learning programming either, as there's zero "programming" in "configure, make".
In fact installing from the source is often done in a terribly wrong way, via simple "make install", which avoids your OS'es package manager, and just directly copies random files into your system -- often you won't have the means to cleanly uninstall that.
To summarize, compiling from the source is "educational" only in the sense of teaching yourself to use a wrong and useless practice, instead of doing it properly via correctly setting up and using the package manager.