Because the few projects that I've seen using it assume an infinite amount of RAM and CPU threads to be able to compile. On top of that their version of 'make' doesn't recognize or honor MAKEOPTS. Instead you have to create a world readable file off the root of the filesystem to control it's behavior.

Interesting - 7.1 requires (without any option for an expirienced admin to override) the target machine to have at least 32M. Now this version is listed (in the ZDnet article) as requiring 64M. I'm sorry but I still have older machines on my home network that work quite well with 16M since I know how to get rid of the extra kitchen sinks that even the so called "Expert" minimal install puts on a system.

Time to go to Debian and stop the code bloat.