apt-get source linux-restricted modules

[Stefan Bader]

Colin Watson wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 11:30:30AM +0100, Stefan Bader wrote:
>> This was briefly discussed/encountered this morning and after some thoughts 
>> on it I am not completely sure this is really a bug or just the odd way 
>> things are supposed to happen.
>> The thing probably most starters (me too) stumble over is, if they try to 
>> build or modify the lrm package (the same would happen with lum+lbm but 
>> since we start from git trees there it does not show up as with lrm) the 
>> first thing to try is: apt-get source linux-restircted-modules. However 
>> this will result in the linux-meta source to be fetched. The same happens 
>> with linux-restricted-modules-generic. This is confusing but probably the 
>> very right thing, given that both are names of meta-packages and the source 
>> package for those _is_ linux-meta. The real package is 
>> linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r) for the current running kernel and 
>> this correctly fetches the right source.
>>
>> The question now is: can or should this be changed or is there no way 
>> around it but has just to be clearly documented on the wiki. Is the source 
>> package of a meta-package the source it was build from or the source it 
>> resolves to?
> 
> Metapackages aren't magic at this level. There is absolutely nothing
> special to metapackages (as such; i.e. packages that have no significant
> content themselves, but exist purely for their dependencies) going on
> here.
> 
> The only thing that's odd here is that there's a 'linux' source package
> that produces a bunch of binaries (not including 'linux'), a
> 'linux-restricted-modules' source package that produces another bunch of
> binaries (not including 'linux-restricted-modules'), and a 'linux-meta'
> source package that produces a bunch of binaries (including 'linux' and
> 'linux-restricted-modules'). Thus there is an ambiguity: it is not clear
> whether you wanted the source for the binary package 'linux' or the
> source package 'linux'.
> 
> I did say on IRC that this was a bug, but on a little further
> investigation I find that it's configurable. apt-get(8) says:
> 
>        --only-source
>            Only has meaning for the source and build-dep commands.
>            Indicates that the given source names are not to be mapped
>            through the binary table. This means that if this option is
>            specified, these commands will only accept source package
>            names as arguments, rather than accepting binary package
>            names and looking up the corresponding source package.
>            Configuration Item: APT::Get::Only-Source.
> 
> In other words, 'apt-get --only-source source linux-restricted-modules'

In our special case (and I do not know the roots of this) the name of the 
source package is linux-restricted-modules-<kernel-version> (e.g. 2.6.24).
To me this looks a bit like some probably historic thing, since the source 
package for the kernel is linux and produces the versioned kernel packages. But 
then, this might be a strange way from the packaging point of view.

Stefan

> means "no, really the source package linux-restricted-modules, not
> whatever source package produces the linux-restricted-modules binary". I
> think if I had been writing this code I'd have made it the default, but
> given that it's a configuration option I'm not sure that it's worth
> causing confusion by changing the default. It probably makes sense to
> just document --only-source for the kernel team.
> 
> Cheers,
> 


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