Fair enough. In that job I was working on a remote Linux system that was quite outdated. So everything I wanted to install (newer version of Emacs, etc) require

Fair enough. In that job I was working on a remote Linux system that was quite outdated. So everything I wanted to install (newer version of Emacs, etc) required me to build so many libraries, as the system ones were too old (Emacs alone required 50-100). I didn't want the hassle of keeping all the source code around.