[PeachPlum]

> some greybeards are still pretty attached to that idea

"Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask yourself, 'Why was it put there in the first place?'" G.K. Chesterton

[loeg]

In this case it's just about sane defaults and options. You could take any binary-update Linux distribution and update from source yourself if you wanted to. It was always an option. All of the build machinery and sources were published from the beginning.

With the BSDs, you didn't even have the option of binary updates or packages until quite recently.

[redshirt]

Yup. Same for code that looks unused :). Very good advice. Sometimes fences can come down, sometimes they make better neighbors.