I did, but I always strongly disliked it.
The moment you compile, you know your program is not going to be patched against security flaws.
This should be a no-go in production.

i use lfs/blfs so everything is compiled from source

Nothing big; small stuff like YAD, SCT - a tiny binary for setting night-time screen 'red tint' levels.....the most recent release of smartmontools, gKrellM, grip. Things of that nature.

These have been, by & large, successful.

(Oh, and the gimp-gap plugin for the G.I.M.P, some years ago, from a Slackware 'recipe', under the patient tutelage of another fellow 'Puppian'. I was really new to Linux in those days, yet wanted this particular plugin for a personal graphics project, so he tutored me, via TeamViewer, from the other end of the UK. I later found out that I could have obtained what I needed via a .deb package from the 12.04 'Precise Pangolin' Ubuntu repos.......but it was all valuable practice.)

And the most recent was the last but one release (1.8.0) of the DeaDBeeF audio player, including a couple of necessary dependencies, plus a few assorted plug-ins for same.....mainly to get the best performance out of an elderly integrated sound chip.

I'm happy to tackle anything that's not too hard, if I think I stand a chance of a successful outcome.


Mike.

Lol, funny question for a Linux forum 😎 Of course I compile things from the source code, as a Slackware guy I do that quite often... I also drink a lot of tea 😉

I don't find it funny, I think it's interesting, as of right now about 10% of the voters voted no.

I also find the result somewhat interesting - you'd think on the one hand that given it's Linux we're talking about the result would be about right. But on the other hand, you'd think with the "newer generations" using Linux, they would stay within the package manager and be more likely to add extra software repo's rather than try and compile stuff themselves - therefore the "No" vote should be at least a little higher... interesting.

Ran gentoo a while ago. I also compiled OpenTTD by hand a while ago.

I consider returning to gentoo a good idea.

Yup, when I've wanted to run free software and my distro didn't have a package for it.

I've not done it in a while though. One of the reasons I came back to the Ubuntu family after a couple of years of Debian is the Ubuntu PPA system. Chances are if something's not in the main Ubuntu repos there's a PPA or a developer's repo for it. I don't particularly mind doing the classic configure, make, install routine; I do mind having to check for and install software updates manually.

I tend to make my own build of mpv, as there really aren't any good builds for Debian Stretch (the version in the repos is basically ancient). To build mpv using the build scripts from this separate repo, you also need to build libass and ffmpeg from source.

On most of the distros I've used, Roxterm (one of my favorite terminals) is either not in the repos, or the versions available are ancient builds from back when Roxterm was still hosted on Source Forge. (These versions suffer from a window sizing bug, which is a result of code rot). It's often easier for me to get the code from github, and stumble my way through compiling it, myself. (Why do developers almost never document which dev libraries the program needs to build successfully?)

They rely on the configure script to do that for you.

No... My Being has never. However, IT will soon. IT's a newbie to Linux. 😉

Most recently I had to compile the Xilinx ISE application. Since the installation requires downloading a very large source file from the Xilinx website, and placing that into the compile directory, there is no option (currently) of compiling automatically.

I have manually compiled others just because I could.


Also, I regularly compile an android application when the upstream repository changes. Actually I have a script that does this automatically. I include this because you did not specify if the open-source application was for Linux ...

I used to compile everything when i was using gentoo. Still as a slackware user i have to compile things.

I'm not sure that gentoo counts. I used it briefly years ago and I remember being bewildered by the automated compilations going on under my nose. It seemed to work exactly like the binary package managers I was used to, right down to installing dependencies before the requested package, only with source code instead.

I think the thread is about compiling things by hand rather than installing them via a package manager.

Compiled (and modified) Kernel drivers, games application programs for Linux. Currently I use an Eclipse based open source IDE with GNUC to compile lwIP, FreeRTOS and an open source controller api into an application.