Source packages appropriate by default?

[Dale Amon]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 03:22:50PM +0100, Robie Basak wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 03:04:20PM +0100, J Fernyhough wrote:
> > On 21 May 2013 13:55, Robie Basak <robie.basak at canonical.com> wrote:
> > > What if we provided a reasonable message if no deb-src lines are
> > > defined, with a single simple command to add them and run "apt-get
> > > update" for you?
> > 
> > I don't think it would even need that - software-properties (Software
> > & Updates) already has the necessary checkbox. All that is needed to
> > enable sources is to tick that box.
> 
> Provided that the user knows that the box is there. Otherwise, it risks
> making the availability of the source obscure, and this is where I agree
> with Scott in that it is against the spirit of free software to make
> source availability obscure.
> 
> I'm not going to make a subjective judgement as to what constitutes
> obscurity here. I tend to edit sources.list directly, so it's not really
> my area.

Yep, one of the first things I do is to manually fix whatever has been
done to it and add my own files back into sources.list.d. I tend to do
all my work with dselect, dpkg or apt-get tools and have my own source
and binary repositories.
 
> There's also the server use case to consider. We don't have
> the software-properties GUI, which is why I proposed the message on an
> "apt-get source" failure due to no sources being defined.
> 
> > > From a technical point of view, does mirroring the deb lines into
> > > deb-src lines work in all cases? Would doing so break anything?
> > 
> > This is effectively what Software Sources does under-the-hood.
> 
> Perhaps we could implement enabling the sources easily from the CLI
> using the underlying Python library? software-properties-common and
> python3-software-properties are seeded on Server.

Make it all transparent. Make sure people who do not know about it
can discover it and learn. Open source is about liberty in the sense
that, unlike Microsoft, the Linux systems are self-teaching down to
their deepest levels. It should be really easy for people to get
their interest piqued and to follow up on it. That is why I absolutely
*hate* non-ascii configuration files. I do virtually all my maintenance
in command line via zile. I have even been known to do binary edits
on occasion to bypass what some obnoxious people do with binary
config data.

You are not just coders. You are teachers.