Translations:Binary package guide/4/en


 * 1) First of all, it allows administrators to keep similar systems updated. Having to compile everything from source can become time consuming at times. Maintaining several similar systems, possibly some of them rather slow, can be much easier if only one system has to compile everything from source and the other systems reuse the binary packages.
 * 2) A second reason is to do safe updates. For mission critical systems it is important to stay usable as much as possible. This can be done by a staging server that performs all updates first and once the staging server is in a good state updates can be applied to the critical system. A variant of this approach is to do the updates in a chroot on the same system and use the binaries created there on the real system.
 * 3) A third reason is as a backup. Sometimes binary package are the only way of recovering a broken system (i.e. broken compiler). Having them around either on a binary package server or locally can be of great help.
 * 4) Finally, it also supports updating very old systems. The task of updating very old systems can be greatly eased using binary packages. It is usually easier to install binary packages as those don't require the build time dependencies to be installed / updated and the failures in the build process for them can be avoided.