Why I Don't Use Third-Party Binary Packages
There are a number of third-party package repositories out there for Linux distributions. For example, Fedora runs the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository, which contains builds of open source software that isn’t supplied with Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Similarly, a lot of projects have their own repositories that supply builds of software for OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Maybe it’s just because I’m old-school, and maybe it’s because I enjoy compiling things, but I really don’t like the idea of using binaries found on the Internet. I never have. As an aside, I really tried hard to make the rest of this post not be critical, or seem like criticism, but instead just be a reflection of …
