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Really, why would everyone not rebuild it? People have pointed out tons of reasons why distros do their own builds, but really I don't understand what would possibly be a reason not to!? The build system itself also is just a piece of software that gets distributed along with the source of the software to be built, and just as you can download and run curl and get a predictable result (the download of some URL), you can download and run the curl build system and get a predictable result (a cURL binary). So, in that regard, what does it matter what execution of the cURL build system your cURL binary came from? In particular with the trend towards reproducible builds, where the build result will be bit-identical between different runs of the build system if it's using the same compiler (version), I just don't see why you care!? Yeah, distros shouldn't just modify the software they package willy-nilly, but that's completely orthogonal to whether they should do their own builds. There are many reasons for applying small changes to enable integration with the distro, and in particular it's just unreasonable to expect that everyone of the thousands of upstream authors or Debian packages, say, operate machines of all ten CPU architectures that are currently supported by Debian so they can provide binaries for all architectures. So, if you want to be able to distribute software written by people who don't happen to have a System z or a MIPS machine in Debian, maintainers have to prepare packages in such a way that binaries for those architectures can be built--and if they do that, it's trivial to also build all the other architectures from the same source. Adding special cases for when a binary is already available for some architecture from upstream would be just completely pointless complexity. |