Bits from Debian

Bits from Debian

all Debian source are belong to us

On Tue 02 July 2013 with tags mirror announce sources
Written by Ana Guerrero

This is a verbatim repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post

TL;DR: go to http://sources.debian.net and enjoy.


Debsources is a new toy I've been working on at IRILL together with Matthieu Caneill. In essence, debsources is a simple web application that allows to publish an unpacked Debian source mirror on the Web.

You can deploy Debsources where you please, but there is a main instance at http://sources.debian.net (sources.d.n for short) that you will probably find interesting. sources.d.n follows closely the Debian archive in two ways:

  1. it is updated 4 times a day to reflect the content of the Debian archive
  2. it contains sources coming from official Debian suites: the usual ones (from oldstable to experimental), *-updates (ex volatile), *-proposed-updates, and *-backports (from Wheezy on)

Via sources.d.n you can therefore browse the content of Debian source packages with usual code viewing features like syntax highlighting. More interestingly, you can search through the source code (of unstable only, though) via integration with http://codesearch.debian.net. You can also use sources.d.n programmatically to query available versions or link to specific lines, with the possibility of adding contextual pop-up messages (example).

In fact, you might have stumbled upon sources.d.n already in the past few days, via other popular Debian services where it has already been integrated. In particular: codesearch.d.n now defaults to show results via sources.d.n, and the PTS has grown new "browse source code" hyperlinks that point to it. If you've ideas of other Debian services where sources.d.n should be integrated, please let me know.

I find Debsources and sources.d.n already quite useful but, as it often happens, there is still a lot TODO. Obviously, it is all Free Software (released under GNU AGPLv3). Do not hesitate to report new bugs and, better, to submit patches for the outstanding ones.

Acknowledgements

  • Matthieu Caneill is the main developer of Debsources web front-end; sources.d.n wouldn't exist without him.
  • others have already contributed patches to integrate sources.d.n with other services, in particular:
    • many thanks to Michael Stapelberg (for codesearch.d.n integration), and
    • Paul Wise (for PTS integration).
  • a full list of contributors is available and eagerly waiting for new additions
  • IRILL has kindly provided sponsoring for Matthieu's initial development work on Debsources, and offered both the server and hosting facilities that power sources.d.n

PS in case you were wondering: at present sources.d.n requires ~381 GB of disk space to hold all uncompressed source packages, plus ~83 GB for the local (compressed) source mirror


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