Are there any risks or disadvantages to building software from source, compared to installing a package? Can it mess with my system in any way?

I usually avoid it because I’ve found it to be a faff and often doesn’t work anyway but in a couple of cases it has been necessary.

  • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
    2·
    13 days ago

    Arch also kinda allows that if you write custom PKGBUILD file. It’s easy to write for simple stuffs that are based on make/cargo etc.

    It’s time consuming if some program gives you 100s of lines of code in bash script to install their program though.

    Edit:

    Another disadvantage of building from source is dependency management. You might accidentally uninstall some dependencies, the standard library versions might change and break your packages, etc.