The title pretty much says it all. I'm working on a largeish software project that recently upgraded to Java 8. We want to incorporate the latest version of Groovy (2.4.1) for some aspects of the project. I'm creating an RPM for internal deployment purposes (for various reasons that I won't go into here, we don't want to use GVM or other means to install), and I'm wondering if anyone can offer a compelling argument for compiling from source using Java 8 versus grabbing the binary/sdk distribution. It seems like a bit of a tossup to me and I'm currently leaning in favor of the convenience of the binary distribution, but I'd like to hear what others have to say.
I would always recommend using pre-built binaries unless you have to make changes. The overhead of maintaining the source, and keeping it compiled is not worth the benefits (if there are any). Compiling from source should always be a last resort.