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I feel like such a greybeard now... I remember when source code was the only way to get software. A pre-built binary? Luxury!

• dunham 3y ago
  And it often involved a hard-fought battle with the internals of a configure script.
  • kwhitefoot 3y ago
    A proper configure script should do all that battling for you. At least it did when I needed Emacs on a Dec Alpha machine. I just did ./configure, make, and make install and everything worked.
• IshKebab 3y ago
  You mean that 11 month period between September 1991 when Linux was first released and August 1992 when the SLS distro was released?
  • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Open source did not begin with Linux, and the existence of Linux distros did not mean that everything a user wanted had binary packages available.
    • IshKebab 3y ago
      Ah I misread - thought he said Linux software.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Fair enough
  • ok123456 3y ago
    No. Most open-source packages that weren't universal enough to warrant a package often just gave you a c program with the Autotools scripts to build it. These scripts may or may not have worked for you. The BSD user ports collection was at least curated so that these scripts all worked.