[lug] Binary Distros - Custom Package Feature Selection

[Davide Del Vento]

Lee,

Without actually knowing the answer to your question, I don't see how this
can be handled differently than recompiling from source. For the example
you provide, 18 binary features would lead to 2**18 binary versions of the
package, as you hinted. Even more modest packages with 8-10 features (or
considering only the 8-10 most popular compile-time features that some
people want on whereas other want off) would lead to a combinatorial
explosion of too many versions of each binary...

So if a distro with binary feature selection does exist, it must cover only
an extremely reduced set of combinations for each package, probably
hand-picked among the most popular sets. Do you think you are picking a
feature set which is quite popular? If not, don't even waste your time
looking, just keep compiling: https://www.xkcd.com/303/

On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 1:17 AM, Lee Woodworth <blug-mail at duboulder.com>
wrote:

> I moved from RH7.3ish may years ago because I was installing
> a lot of things from source anyway to handle specific package
> features (e.g. disable ldap/dbus/... support). At the time,
> binary distros were building packages with a large set of
> features enabled.
>
> The web search results I am getting for custom package feature
> selection lead me to believe that binary distros still handle
> feature selection by compiling from source one way or another.
>
> Is this correct or have I missed something? Note that postfix
> has at least 18 non-documentation features that can be selected
> at build time. So distro-provided package-variations with different
> feature sets is not usually a solution for what I want to do.
>
> The TLDR; for the why is I got bit by the code red worm because
> windows nt had more than one place to turn off indexing. We didn't
> use the indexing so I disabled it in one place but didn't know about
> the other.
>
> Ever since, I do up-front work to remove unused package/kernel
> features on servers.
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