I was chatting with a friend who works in operations, and the topic of yum install versus source installation came up. I really didn’t expect that opinions on this would be so divided. Some believe that if you don’t use source installation, you’re not a good operations engineer or system administrator. That’s a bit of an overgeneralization. I’d like to share my thoughts here. Regular readers of my blog might know that in earlier posts about servers, I mostly used source installations. Later, I switched to mostly using yum installs, only resorting to source installation when a package wasn’t available in the yum repository. In my view, there’s basically no difference between yum installation and source installation. In the end, they both generate the files the system needs, so what’s the difference?
I. Differences in Method Between Yum Install and Source Installation
1. Yum install downloads an RPM package from the yum repository to your local machine and installs it. This RPM package is a binary package that someone else has already compiled and packaged. This method is more accurately described as an update rather than a fresh installation.
2. Source installation involves downloading the source code package, then compiling and installing it. During the compilation process, you can set specific parameters.
II. Analysis of Advantages and Disadvantages
1. Advantages and Disadvantages of Yum Installation
The advantage of yum install, which every ops engineer knows well, is that it’s quick and convenient for installing things, especially since you don’t have to worry about package dependencies.
The disadvantage is that the installation process cannot be manually intervened. You cannot customize the installation to your needs. You get whatever is in the repository, and the available versions are often relatively old.
2. Advantages and Disadvantages of Source Installation
The advantage of source installation is that during the compilation and installation process, you can set parameters to tailor the installation to your requirements. You can also choose the specific version you want, offering greater flexibility.
The disadvantage is that because the package is too new or for other reasons, required dependencies might be missing or have versions that are too old. This forces you to resolve dependency issues. In Linux systems, packages often chain dependencies on one another. You might try to install one small tool and end up having to solve a pile of dependency problems, wasting a lot of time for results that aren’t worth the effort. Furthermore, if you perform too many source installations, you might become afraid to upgrade the system, because doing so could render previously manually installed software unusable.
Many ops engineers believe that source installation yields better performance than yum installation, thinking that choosing parameters during installation is definitely better than yum blindly installing a bunch of stuff. To ops people who think this way, I can only say, they don’t understand configuration. They simply don’t know the software they’re installing. In my opinion, for the same version, a yum installation and a source installation are completely identical.