Source packages appropriate by default?

[Daniel J Blueman]

(pardon the top-posting)

I think the slight reduction in ethics (relevant mainly to developers)
is a good trade to help deployability in the real world. We'll leave
sources enabled by default for development releases.

For the other 99% of users, where practicality is more important than
immediate access to source, we end up wasting ~10% of Canonical and
our mirror's bandwidth on the source updates. This makes a difference
when behind a congested network, running on battery or so on. That 10%
when accessing security.ubuntu.com really helps, particularly when
topologically distant from the UK (if you have good network
connectivity, ask someone who hasn't got it).

No?

On 23 July 2013 13:51, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 23, 2013 11:02:00 AM Daniel J Blueman wrote:
>> By large, developers are uninterested in this, but it is important for
>> users and where we use Ubuntu.
>>
>> Anyone care to comment on how we can progress this?
>
> I think most developers would believe the current situation is appropriate.
> By default users have the same access to source and binary packages and for a
> free software distribution, that is the ethically correct approach.
>
> Scott K
>
>> On 15 July 2013 13:32, Daniel J Blueman <daniel at quora.org> wrote:
>> > From earlier feedback, there were no overriding reasons why package
>> > sources should be enabled by default.
>> >
>> > We not only save congestion on security.ubuntu.com, but quite a lot of
>> > country-level mirrors point to Canonical's servers, which are
>> > relatively distant and slow (~80KB/s from here), so this is a win.
>> >
>> > So, what's the path to change this?
>> >
>> > On 21 May 2013 22:04, J Fernyhough <j.fernyhough at gmail.com> 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.
>> >>
>> >>> 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.
>> >>
>> >> I have to agree, if the amount being downloaded is not trivial (which
>> >> I thought it was) then there's no need to have them enabled by default
>> >> when it's very easy to turn them on. One of the first things I do on
>> >> any new install is disable those that aren't needed.
>> >>
>> >> Jonathon
>> >>
>> >> (to the list this time)
>> >>
>> >> --
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>> > --
>> > Daniel J Blueman
>
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--
Daniel J Blueman