I've long had a practice of always building internet-facing software from source obtained directly from project mirrors, though I have been surprised how few of my friends -- including the very skilled ones -- follow this same practice. But putting aside the "rpm/apt-get/up2date/emerge" versus "source" religious debate for now, I decided to codify my build-from-source practices in a Tech Tip.

Some time ago I started parking all of my "configure" options in a front-end script that is actually used to build the software, and it's been a huge win. This goes beyond simply making notes: the build options are now part of source code, and I've been completely delighted with it. I hope that others who build from source find it as useful as I have.

Unixwiz.net Tech Tip: Good practices for building packages from source