At the time (don’t know if this is better now), pkgsrc had quarterly snapshots from which binaries were built and made available. When a vulnerability was found in a package, the corresponding binary would be removed from FTP. This led to the unfortunate case that one would have to recompile the package from source. And if it was a lower-level dependency like, say, libpng, this would cause a cascade of recompilations of everything and the kitchen sink (e.g. Emacs, Firefox, etc) leading to hours of recompiling.
Because you’d want to recompile a non-vulnerable version, you’d be compiling from CVS HEAD, which often meant there’d often be more (unrelated) breakage, so you wouldn’t even be able to continue.
And of course, my system would often be unusable because I wouldn’t have the package installed until the recompilation was done.
And sometimes, the binaries were unavailable because the package was broken or something else went wrong, so one would have to compile a package from source once in a while.
At the time (don’t know if this is better now), pkgsrc had quarterly snapshots from which binaries were built and made available. When a vulnerability was found in a package, the corresponding binary would be removed from FTP. This led to the unfortunate case that one would have to recompile the package from source. And if it was a lower-level dependency like, say, libpng, this would cause a cascade of recompilations of everything and the kitchen sink (e.g. Emacs, Firefox, etc) leading to hours of recompiling.
Because you’d want to recompile a non-vulnerable version, you’d be compiling from CVS HEAD, which often meant there’d often be more (unrelated) breakage, so you wouldn’t even be able to continue.
And of course, my system would often be unusable because I wouldn’t have the package installed until the recompilation was done.
And sometimes, the binaries were unavailable because the package was broken or something else went wrong, so one would have to compile a package from source once in a while.
score 2 · canonical