To compile or use binaries
Recently we setup a new Sun Ray server, and when people tried to use gaim it would keep saying that there were no protocols available. So we decided to install Gaim from blastwave.org like we did on the previous Sun Ray server. Well as Justin was installing it, (we have a local mirror), it was taking for ever and he messaged me about why it was installing firefox? I did not know so I told him to stop it and I would just look in to making the version of Gaim that comes with Solaris 10 work correctly (which happened to be making a sym link from /usr/share to /share and one form /usr/lib/gaim to /lib/gaim, and everything works, supposedly this fix will be in Solaris 10 U3?)..
Anyways tonight I took a freshly installed zone on my home server and installed Gaim on it from blastwave, 67 packages and 402 Meg later it is installed. Here is a list of the packages it installs, and the size of them in bytes:
| Package Name | Package Size in Byte |
| CSWmozilla | 72,840,704 |
| CSWfirefox | 42,207,744 |
| CSWgtk2 | 38,885,888 |
| CSWbdb4 | 35,985,920 |
| CSWossl | 23,761,920 |
| CSWgaim | 16,473,088 |
| CSWevolution-ds | 16,209,408 |
| CSWgnomepanel | 10,492,928 |
| CSWglib2 | 8,461,312 |
| CSWlibxml2 | 8,178,688 |
| CSWgnomevfs2 | 6,573,568 |
| CSWlibgnomeui | 5,691,904 |
| CSWgconf2 | 5,390,848 |
| CSWkrb5lib | 4,829,184 |
| CSWgcc3g++rt | 4,810,240 |
| CSWggettext | 4,719,616 |
| CSWfortune | 4,470,272 |
| CSWgnutls | 4,464,640 |
| CSWaspell | 4,230,144 |
| CSWbonobo2 | 3,609,088 |
| CSWmeanwhile | 3,445,248 |
| CSWgcrypt | 3,351,040 |
| CSWpango | 3,275,776 |
| CSWoldaprt | 3,089,920 |
| CSWsambalib | 3,061,248 |
| CSWlibcairo | 2,911,232 |
| CSWreadline | 2,718,720 |
| CSWaudiofile | 2,415,104 |
| CSWtiff | 2,357,248 |
| CSWgnomedesktop | 2,317,312 |
| CSWlibbonoboui | 2,031,104 |
| CSWiconv | 1,900,032 |
| CSWorbit2 | 1,878,528 |
| CSWftype2 | 1,809,920 |
| CSWbzip2 | 1,754,112 |
| CSWsasl | 1,675,264 |
| CSWlibgnome | 1,673,216 |
| CSWlibatk | 1,617,920 |
| CSWfconfig | 1,457,152 |
| CSWlibsoup2 | 1,251,840 |
| CSWlibgnomecanvas | 1,244,160 |
| CSWpng | 781,312 |
| CSWgnomemenus | 762,368 |
| CSWgnomekeyring | 642,560 |
| CSWexpat | 485,376 |
| CSWlibart | 446,976 |
| CSWlibcups | 443,904 |
| CSWlibidl | 412,672 |
| CSWopencdk | 379,392 |
| CSWlibglade2 | 330,752 |
| CSWjpeg | 326,144 |
| CSWlibxft2 | 295,936 |
| CSWzlib | 236,544 |
| CSWlibnet | 229,888 |
| CSWesound | 219,136 |
| CSWfam | 215,040 |
| CSWsunmath | 208,896 |
| CSWgpgerr | 179,712 |
| CSWlibpopt | 154,624 |
| CSWlibxrender | 137,728 |
| CSWlibao | 131,072 |
| CSWgtkspell | 84,480 |
| CSWrenderdev | 73,728 |
| CSWpkgget | 60,928 |
| CSWstartupnotif | 57,856 |
| CSWgcc3corert | 40,960 |
| CSWcommon | 3,072 |
Notice the first 2 packages, Firefox and Mozilla (quarter of the space used), now seemed to be required to run Gaim 2.0 for some reason. So back to my title for this post, is it better to compile your own software or use binaries? Well I guess it depends on what you want to do. I usually don’t like having more than one copy of a particular piece of software on a machine (for example I usually get firefox directly from mozilla since it seems to be a more up to date one than the blastwave one). And when looking through the list of what was installed most of that is already included in Solaris 10, so there is now two copies of each on the machine.
So a question to the blastwave people, any chance of building special packages just for solaris 10 that are linked againest the libraries already in solaris 10?
