Hello,
1) You are more than welcome to use packages if you'd like. Custombuild is essentially a courtesy to you, and you can overwrite (or shutdown) those CB services if you wish, that's not a problem.
It would then just be up to you to manage the packages with apt-get, and ensure all paths match, and all settings are DA compatible.
Note that many of the paths DA uses can be changed by editing the directadmin.conf.
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The reason we chose source compiles is as follows:
2) When a new version comes out, we can release it to all DA clients very quickly. We've noticed that packages are usually lagged behind quite along time for updates.
3) Since it's compiled anyway, you can very easily make minor changes to the configure lines, letting you add or remove any options you want from the build.
4) Many admin's have fairly customized systems with different libraries. Precompiled binaries, although handy to install, have a much lower chance of working than binaries which are compiled 100% against the libraries that are present.
If you compile a binary against on library, and install it on the same OS but which has different versions of the libraries, you run the chance of having issues or linking errors.
Compiling from source eliminates those issues.
5) DirectAdmin can run on many different OS versions and OS types. With custombuild, we simply add the source, and change the number in the versions.txt file.
If we had to create a package for each new version of a service, for every single OS we support, most of our time would be used up managing/updating packages, instead of more productive things like support requests and new DA features.
Hope that helps to clarify some of our decision making!
Thanks,
John