If you've never compiled your own Apache, you either haven't been using Apache as long as many of us or you were missing out on a good deal of its better functionality. IMO the vendor binaries from any vendor were not ready for high-volume web hosting just a handful of years ago. In recent years with advances within Apache and in the package management teams for the distributions, prebuilt Apache and addons for it have become a viable option.

There used to be something called Apache Toolkit, which was a menu-driven configurator for Apache, the DSOs, the basic configuration, and more. It was, IME, the most robust way to deploy a strong Apache configuration in a short amount of time. It would apply all the necessary patches, configure the build environment, compile everything, and install it for you. I'm not sure if it's still around, because RedHat/CentOS, Suse, Mandriva, and Debian all seem to have solid enough Apache packages now.