Source packages appropriate by default?

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, July 23, 2013 08:21:40 AM Jordon Bedwell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> 
wrote:
> > Assuming add-apt-repository was installed by default, it's close.  I think
> > something like this might be reasonable (imagine some policykit or
> > whatever it is called now magic here):
> > 
> > $ sudo apt-get source hello
> > Reading package lists... Done
> > Building dependency tree
> > Reading state information... Done
> > E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list
> > Would you like 'source' URIs to be added? (y/N)
> > Y
> > deb-src lines have been added to your sources.list.
> > ...
> > Get:9 http://archive.ubuntu.com saucy/main Sources [1,001 kB]
> > Get:10 http://archive.ubuntu.com saucy/restricted Sources [6,578 B]
> > Get:11 http://archive.ubuntu.com saucy/universe Sources [6,071 kB]
> > 
> > In other words, it's, I think, possible to make it roughly as easy as it
> > is
> > now to get source without having the sources.list "cluttered".  For users
> > of our releases, I doubt it saves much, but that would be a way to do it
> > that both avoids whatever amount of bandwidth usage is involved until the
> > user opts in to it, but preserves ready access to the source that I think
> > is important.
> Depending on how clever and one-off you want to be you could also just
> give them the http url to the source as well.  It shouldn't be that
> hard to guess since apt already has most of the information needed to
> just generate the URL from a chosen apt server in the normal deb.
> This would allow for one-off downloads (for example somebody needs to
> look at the way debian does some of it's compiles so they can
> replicate without a package so they grab the source for nginx --
> that's a one-off IMO if they would never use any other source
> package.)
> 
> Though I personally like a default command that would be something
> like add-apt-default-sources so you can also give them the ability to
> run that command and disable sources too (but you can already do that
> via the GUI and terminal by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and such.)

Before we run off and expend a lot more effort on this, I'd like to see 
something other than handwaving that this is really is a significant issue.

/ubuntu/dists/raring-security/main/source

[ ]	Release	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	106
[ ]	Sources.bz2	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	32K
[ ]	Sources.gz	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	38K

For end users, how much is really downloaded?

/ubuntu/dists/raring-updates/main/source

[ ]	Release	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	105
[ ]	Sources.bz2	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	50K
[ ]	Sources.gz	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	62K

/ubuntu/dists/raring-updates/universe/source

[ ]	Release	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	109
[ ]	Sources.bz2	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	64K
[ ]	Sources.gz	24-Jul-2013 01:16 	77K

It doesn't seem like a lot.

Scott K