-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:01:09 +0000 Digby Tarvin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFD2QThkpJ43hY3cTURAqEmAKCXIDKpfnX3wXlwaOsLcVPoyDqjbQCfX2pq Sz6jCEo0wKzV4h6iLWMubS4= =UW+J -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
