Re: debian source philosophy
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On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:01:09 +0000
Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org> wrote:
> This is a general question on Unix/Linux philosophy/configuration
> on which I would be curious to know what the Debian view/situation
> is....
>
> I am a big fan of having my sources readily and instantly available,
> and one of the things I was least happy with when I moved from my
> old BSD/OS system to Linux was that the source was never quite so
> handy...
>
> For example in the old BSD system, if I had a binary
> executable <path>/foo
> then I could generally be confident of two things:
> 1. 'man foo' will tell me how to run it
> 2. 'cd /usr/src/<path>/foo;make' could rebuild it
>
> There were some exceptions, for example if foo was not part of
> the official distribution, but something I had installed from
> elsewhere, then the source would be in
> /usr/local/src/<path>/foo
> and the directory name would often be the program name with
> version numbers appended, but it was still reasonably straigh
> forward to locate the source directory given the path to
> a random executable..
>
> On some systems (eg Inferno), the path to the source is a
> standard part of each manpage, which I think is a great idea.
>
> The big advantage of having the source all unpacked and online
> is I can use tools like find and grep on my entire source tree,
> so that even if I am not interested in modifying something, it
> becomes part of a vast library of programming examples and
> documentation on how every part of the system works. Or if
> I want a complete list of all the programs that reference
> a particular header file or library, it is a simple find/grep
> job rather than needing special dedicated tools.
>
> Unfortunately most Linux distros seem to assume that people don't
> normally want the source on their systems unless they explicitly
> ask for it.
>
> Even on gentoo, where the policy is to build everything from source
> on the target system, the unpacked sources are by default removed
> at the completion of the build, and even if that is over-ridden
> the the source directories are not neatly arranged in a
> directory structure that in any way mirrors the locations of
> the related binaries..
>
> So my question is - how close can I get to this ideal with the
> APT package management system on Debian? Is there some way to
> request that source is always downloaded with any binary that
> it installs? Or to request that sources for all installed
> packages be installed? Can I have the source automatically
> unpacked and accessible rather than left in an obscure compressed
> archive somewhere?
>
> I will get around reading all of the documentation, but perhaps
> some of the more experienced debian users can give me a bit of
> a heads-up on how far I can expect to eventually get on a
> Debian system.
This isn't a full answer to your question, but should help you get
started in the right direction. apt-get install apt-build, then do a
man apt-build. You might also do a man apt-get and read the sections on
source and build-dep.
HTH,
Jacob
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