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.
Thanks,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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