Reliance on Debian packages?

[skaag]

Any chance that DA will one day stop compiling their own Apache, PHP and MySQL?
(as well as TTF, Exim, Dovecot, etc)

I'm quite sick and tired of all that compilation. If I wanted all my stuff recompiled all the time, I would just use Gentoo.

 

[NoBaloney2]

That's one of the main advantages of DirectAdmin; it gives you flexibility so you can install the versions and (in some cases) the programs you want. The main reason I switched from Plesk to DirectAdmin was whenever I wanted a different version of something I had to pay for custom installation, and then whenever I wanted an update I had to pay again.

While I'm not a decisionmaker for JBMC, the company who publishes DirectAdmin, if I were, it won't. Hopefully John will post and let us know his feelings.

Jeff

 

[skaag]

Well here's the thing: I can fire up an ubuntu server, with the most efficient configuration you can imagine. PHP-fpm, mod_ruid, Latest apache, apc, xcache, all the PHP modules such as gd, imap, PHP-ssh, XML, etc. coupled with the percona MySQL release (faster!), varnish, protection modules, and a bunch of other goodies.

I don't need directadmin to compile it for me. I just need a nice web interface for customers.

As it is, every time I install DA I find myself spending hours tweaking it with custom build, to bring it to where I need it to be.

If it also compiled all those addons I might feel differently but it doesn't.

 

[DirectAdmin Support]

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.

---

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