Source packages appropriate by default?

[Scott Ritchie]

On 07/23/2013 12:02 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 23, 2013 06:59:43 AM Robie Basak wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 01:51:46AM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>>> I think most developers would believe the current situation is
>>> appropriate.
>>
>> I disagree.
>>
>>> By default users have the same access to source and binary packages and
>>> for a free software distribution, that is the ethically correct approach.
>> Indeed, but you never replied to my original response to your concern.
>> By "same access", do you specifically require the mechanism to be to
>> keep users' local apt caches maintained with source entries? If so, why
>> is such a mechanism necessary to fit the spirit of Free Software? If the
>> user still has easy access to the source, why is this not sufficient?
>>
>> I'm happy to discuss what "easy access" might actually mean, but I see
>> no reason that it should require the waste of users' bandwidth and time.
> 
> Sorry.  I didn't mean to ignore you.
> 
> What's easy?  For example, I think "install more packages to get the tools to 
> get the source" (use pull-lp-source in ubuntu-dev-tools) doesn't qualify.  
> There are tons of documentation all over the web and other places as well that 
> assume apt-get source works.  
> 

I agree, it would be nice to keep existing things working.

> So those are a couple of examples of what I think is definitely not what we 
> want.  I'm open to discussion about alternate ways to preserve easy access to 
> the source.
> 

What if we disabled default source fetching but changed apt-get source
to offer to turn them back on when it was run?

-Scott Ritchie