[lug] Binary Distros - Custom Package Feature Selection

[Lee Woodworth]

Thanks to all for the info.

I had been thinking it would be easier to bring somebody on
board if we used a mainstream binary distro. Now I think
it will be a wash since there would be various exceptions
to the defaults for someone to learn. So I will just
consolidate things and use gentoo which as a very good
system for handling source builds, parameterized init
scripts and a good way of handling configuration file
changes introduced by package version changes.

On 06/22/2018 08:53 AM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> On Fri, 2018-06-22 at 01:17 -0600, Lee Woodworth wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Well, yeah.  The only alternative to compiling from source for custom
> feature selection would be if a binary had loadable modules.  Most
> don't.  GIMP is an example of one that does.
> 
> If you need special features you can do a couple of things.
> 1. Download the src package from the distro and modify to suit your
> needs.
> 2. Download the project source code and compile to suit your needs.
> 
> The latter is generally easier unless a package has special patches for
> the distro (say to change locations of required dependencies or
> something).  If having the binary in package format is necessary you
> can always wrap the build artifacts with a shell script to generate the
> package.  I do this with RPM and OPKG packages.  This technique works
> best with source code that supports autoconf so you can override the
> install directory, allowing you to install to a local directory and use
> that for generating packages.
>