Before yum and when I used to have time for it, I compiled from source
everything on my machine. It wasn't that big of a deal. Just took some
time. The pay-off was significant in performance and speed... reason
being that, if you configure gcc for your particular cpu, the code is
able to take advantage of the hard-wired instruction set particular to
your cpu which don't exist in the generic cpu the repo binaries are
compiled for.
IIRC, just to get the source code out of an rpm you could download the
source rpm and simply do
rpm -i /path/to/package.src.rpm
or in one step do
rpm -i ftp://path/to/package.src.rpm
Alternatively, you could also check out Slackware. The last time I
looked at it (several years ago) it didn't use rpm or apt or any package
management system at all, just tgz files. This is what Linux used to be
before there was a redhat... and it's generally how code files are
handled in development before they become rpms... or whatever.
Source code shouldn't scare anyone. It's interesting stuff and
harmless... just text files, after all. If your students are going to
hack around with it and compile it (which I would hope they would do),
then of course you'll want to take appropriate measures.
More people should be doing this kind of stuff. The world needs more
open source developers. Looking at existing code is a great tool for
learning.
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