Re:From Python to Lua: Why We Switched
by greenleafjacob on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @02:36AM
(#10978790)
On the other hand, occasionally security updates will be surfaced as a patch file and you're waiting on the package managers. At least if you build it yourself you have the option of applying patches.
This is just an argument against bad package managers. Good ones will offer binary packages by default, but allow you to tweak (or just pass ./configure options to) an installation formula, at which point they'll switch over to pulling in the source package, applying your changes to it, building it, and installing the result, while still offering you full package-level management of the result (including having the package satisfy deps correctly.)
I never understood the fear of leaving the system's package manager's packages.
It's trivial when you have a handful of machines, all under your control. It's somewhat less trivial when you are dealing with 1000s of machines under the control of dozens of different people/departments.
I know there's the argument that by straying you don't get security updates, but I can't really imagine Python 2.4 getting much security updates nowadays.