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. Maintaining several similar systems, possibly some of them with older hardware, 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 to itself. Once the staging server is in a good state the updates can then be applied to the critical systems. 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. Often binary packages are the only way of recovering a broken system (i.e. broken compiler). Having pre-compiled binaries around either on a binary package server or locally can be of great help in case of a broken toolchain.
 * 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 helpful to install binary packages on old systems because they do not require build time dependencies to be installed/updated. Binaries packages also avoid failures in build processes since they are pre-compiled.