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You'll save yourself a great deal of time (and a fair amont of pain) if you use pre-built binary packages wherever you can. As has been pointed out above, this won't work for packages you're currently coding on; those need to be recompiled every time you change something.

For things you aren't actively changing, having the pre-built binaries can save you a lot of time (building some of them takes hours) and guarantees that you're coding against the very same version of ROS that the rest of us are using, thereby making sure your code is portable.