As for building from source being 'all the rage' I have to disagree. I was using ROCK some three years ago, and I believe that Slackware was compiling things from source as well long before that. It might be
I still think of package management in Linux as quite a new thing. Believe it or not, compiling from source was the only option for many years. I'm amused that there are people who assume that apt/rpm or whatever have been with us since day one.
however that the threshold for using a compiled-from-source distribution has dropped, making it more available to Joe User.
How the world turns. One of the big selling points for binary distribution was that it lowered the "barriers to entry" for Joe Users as they didn't need to learn how to compile from source, could easily manage installed software and didn't have to waste time/system resource on compiles. The cost of this ease of use in terms of performance was deemed acceptable by many users/administrators as it is alleviated by continuous hardware improvements. It struck me reading this thread that distributions like Gentoo are fashionable amongst the new breed Linux users who want to have the benefits of package management without sacrificing performance. Until reading this I assumed it was only the old time purists (particularly with a BSD background) that wouldn't ever touch pre-compiled binaries that were interested. -Simon.