> "Ports" distros just force building on you.
I agree. With a good "packages" distribution, you have the option of
doing a quick binary install, or setting your own opt(io|imizat)ions
with source package build. I like this, because for ~90% of my
software, I don't change any of the default options, so why waste my
bandwidth and cycles building the same binaries that everybody else
has? And for the other 10%, things that can be heavily optimized to
make use of certain extensions, or that have a wide variety of
compile-time options from which to choose, or that I just want to hack
around in the source, I'm free to do so without compiling every
dependency by hand as well.
Also, much of the so-called optimization/extension advantage goes away
on a non-x86 platform where there aren't 12 different cpus with
different capabilities all trying to use the same ancient binary
interface.
Anyway, if optimization/extension utilization was the primary goal,
one might be just as well off with a package distribution that
maintained separate binary repositories for each distinct processor
class.
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