By building from source do you gain any benefits? Is the code better optimized to your hardware architecture? Is it optimized better in general?Why would someone choose to build from source rather than using a package management system like APT/yum? If there is some kind of optimization gain when does that outweigh the benefit of a package management system?
What are the advantages of building tools/libs from source?
package management;source;compiling
Building from source provides the following options which are not available when using a version from a binary package manager.Compiling from source allows you to:use processor-specific optimizationsuse the very latest versionlearn how compilation & linking work (suggestion from @mattdm)fix bugs, development workset compile-time options (e.g. include X features in vim)