> You might want to unpack a source package for other reasons than > to build it -- e.g., I've sometimes searched for documentation. A > non-programmer might want to do this so that they can typeset the > documentation in LaTeX, instead of printing out the LaTeX2HTML'd > version. The srcpostinst thing was just a trial baloon - I don't think it went over very well. So I'll drop that idea. But if we go with a source package file format that is the same basic thing as what a .deb file is, we can always add it later (if needed). I think it's better to unpack the upstream sources in the debian/rules makefile anyways (using any tool available on the system). I'd oppose having a specialized script file for unpacking them, since it's unnecessary -- you can already do that from the debian/rules makefile. As I said before, I'm quite interested in having a source package that automatically unpacks the upstream sources and patches itself for the purposes of debugging -- and also can be set to automatically build too. This is the equivalent of a "make world". But nobody's saying that the system administrator can't have the option of just "installing" the source, without running any scripts. This should probably be the default behaviour. Before I was advocating the use of a separate "sdpkg" program to install source packages, but it could probably be done with just "dpkg". ie. dpkg -i jdk_1.0.2-7.sdeb Since the extension is .sdeb, dpkg would know that it was a source package, and just put it in the appropriate place. Maybe /var/lib/dpkg/source/jdk_1.0.2-7 possibly? Since the package has dependencies (to .upsdeb's for upstream source, and .deb's for binaries needed to build it), those would also need to be installed too. Cheers, - Jim
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