Bug#626251: /usr/bin/apt-get: apt-get source package/oldstable doesn't work either

[Daniel Hartwig <mandyke@gmail.com>]

On 16 June 2013 16:12, Bill Blough <devel@blough.us> wrote:
>
> As a followup to my previous message -
>
> When running
>
> apt-get source <package>
>
> It appears that <package> needs to be a binary package name, not a
> source package name.  This makes my earlier observation about the "deb"
> entries make a little more sense to me, and leads me to believe that
> this behavior is by design.

Yes.

>
> However, reading the apt-get man page, it's not clear to me that
> "apt-get source" does not allow specifying a source package name instead
> of a binary package name.  Maybe something should be mentioned in the
> man page in case someone else comes along that's as dense as me ;-)
>

You can use ‘--only-source’ to specify source package name.