Dominik Honnef

Debian and the problem with precompiled packages

On my desktop I use Gentoo. Not because I believe in the performance gain of compiling the packages, but because I like the freedom of choosing exactly what components I need, which is, thanks to USE flags, surprisingly easy in Gentoo.

The only problem: Compiling stuff takes its time, and especially on servers I don’t like having to wait minutes up to hours on installing a new package. (Not mentioning all the stuff about stable, running releases and so on, thats another topic). So I use Debian on my server, and most of the time, the precompiled packages weren’t too bad, either.

But today I faced a rather weird choice of the responsible people. It looks like they compiled the php-gd extension in a way, that doesn’t allow you to use the imageantialias() function.

After some short googling I found a blog post which explains how to get the sources (which, even in Debian, is possible), change the rules (configure/build flags) and compile it on your own.

But that doesn’t explain their choice to not include the function in the first place, not even providing an alternate package.