On 2022-12-27 at 07:12, Ole Streicher wrote: > Hi Santiago, > > Santiago Vila <sanv...@debian.org> writes: > >> If you don't have deb-src lines, they are the same as the usual deb >> lines except that they begin with deb-src. > > Just curious: why are the deb line not used by default here?
As a place to look for source-package information in the absence of deb-src lines, you mean? While I have no inside knowledge on this, my inference has always been that it's to avoid downloading (and updating) and storing the index data for source packages, for that presumed large majority of people who have no need to care about source packages. I.e., the act of adding a deb-src line is the way for the sysadmin to denote "for this computer, having convenient access to Debian source packages is sufficiently important that the cost of the index data - in local storage, in network traffic, and in remote-server transmission load - is worth paying". In principle it would probably be possible to design a way of flagging that in reverse (so that deb lines would get both types of index by default, and only if a flag is set would the source-package idex data not be gotten), but just at a glance that looks like it'd be more complicated to engineer, and in any case the transition seems as if it'd be mildly horrific. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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