> Then what the heck is a source distribution good for if you can't do
> source-only upgrades with it????

Uh...

	(1) so you can make local changes and fix bugs more easily?
	(2) so you can easily roll-forward your changes, via a good
	    revision control system, to your source tree?

In (2), you get the new (binary) release going, make the sources work
with your changes, then recompile and reinstall.  It's really Not That
Hard.


Quite frankly, i've never even thought of doing "complete source"
upgrades from release to release as something that people do.

I've yet to see a vendor that supported it with their source
distributions.  Hell, many of those don't even build cleanly to begin
with. 

There's also the "bug reporting hell" problem: if a problem shows up
in the new system, whose fault is it?  there's no longer any common
baseline with which to compare...  (no, i don't really consider "foo +
lots of local changes" upgraded to "foo+1 + lots of local changes" to
be particularly representative of either "foo" or "foo+1".)


cgd