Binaries considered harmful, 32 years later

I was doing a little more diving into Linux history, and ran across this thread from the alt.os.linux newsgroup from April 1992 where Paul Allen (not that one) suggested that distributions (which didn’t quite exist yet) should be source-based.

Binaries considered harmful

I may be missing something really obvious here, but I just don't see the need for all these binaries. I'd rather just have sources.

The most significant Linux distribution that ended up operating this way is Gentoo Linux, which is still going after almost 25 years.

This thread is also where Linus tells the story of how he lost the code to fsck to a bug in the VFS code.