John Dalton

Chris Josephes over on the O’Reilly Sysadmin blog just posted an article titled “It wouldn’t hurt you to use the compiler”, about sysadmins who won’t install anything that didn’t come prepackaged.

As a *nix admin, it used to be assumed that compiling software was part of the job.  While I’ve now reached the point where I avoid compiling things unless absolutely necessary, that’s more because vendor packaging has improved and using those packages greatly reduces my workload.  If I choose to compile something when there’s a vendor package available, I’m effectively nominating myself as a maintainer of a forked version of the package.  There needs to be a pretty good reason before I feel like doing this.

On the other hand, not being capable of doing this would be pretty scary.  Sometimes when things break it’s because of a bug in the software.  The bug might already be fixed upstream, you may even be communicating with developers who’ve fixed it in their source - but if you’re relying on someone to package it up for you before you can use it, you’re out of luck.

Also, there are times when you need to squeeze the most performance out of an application that you can, and usually this means compiling a version which is custom built for your environment.  Obviously if you can’t compile software yourself, this won’t be an option.

Finally, compiling software is frequently the only way to try out the latest versions of software you’re already using, or to get your hands on new tools that may be able to solve a problem in your environment.

Chris mentioned a couple of interview questions he asks prospective sysadmins in order to determine whether or not they understand the process of building software.  I’ve asked similar questions myself; and while our current environment includes users who sometimes need support when compiling their own code, I wouldn’t consider hiring a sysadmin in any position if they didn’t have at least a basic grasp of how to compile something from scratch.