[lug] Binary Distros - Custom Package Feature Selection

[Lee Woodworth]

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.