Re: PW#5-16: Use of /usr/src

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Furthermore, noone has yet to my knowledge come up with a good
> argument as to why we should distribute source code in .deb files,
> when we have a much better scheme for source code.

The reason for doing this is in those cases where people who under normal circumstances would not expect to compile anything, have to for some reason:

1) Recompiling kernels, to get special hardware support etc.
2) recompiling pcmcia software, which needed compile time tweaks
3) compiling qmail, because we are not allowed to distribute binaries

I'm sure there are others, but these three examples are all likely to be done by people who don't want to worry about how one uses dpkg-source etc.

They just want to run a command and end up with a .deb file they can install.

Cheers, Phil.