5

What apt incantations do I need to use to download the source packages for all the installed packages into a directory? (The use case is GPL compliance when giving an installed Ubuntu system to another person along with a computer.)

hsivonen
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  • possible duplicate http://askubuntu.com/questions/28372/how-do-i-get-the-source-code-of-packages-installed-through-apt-get – Tachyons Apr 05 '12 at 13:49
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    You do not need to bother download all the source code for the person to be GPL compliant. It is enough that the code are publicly available. – Fish Monitor Apr 05 '12 at 15:36
  • fossilet, [citation-needed] with references to both GPLv3 text and GPLv2 text. – hsivonen Apr 20 '12 at 11:29
  • Not a duplicate of the other question, since the other question is about getting the source of a single package. – hsivonen Apr 20 '12 at 11:30

4 Answers4

7

Try this..

Create a directory where you want the source for all installed packages to be downloaded, and enter it.

mkdir source; cd source

Create a file named getsource.sh

getsource.sh

#!/bin/bash
dpkg --get-selections | while read line
do
        package=`echo $line | awk '{print $1}'`
        mkdir $package
        cd $package
        apt-get -q source $package
        cd ..
done

Make it executable.

chmod a+x getsource.sh

Execute it..

./getsource.sh

And go grab a cup of coffee :)

SirCharlo
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  • Glad to be of assistance (: – SirCharlo Apr 20 '12 at 14:32
  • For start thanks for your answer... But I tried to use it on a Debian 9 system and had some problems. Here is the answer that worked for me (https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/423280/237337). – koleygr Feb 10 '18 at 21:05
1

An alternative for you might be to just hand out the source CDs:

Jorge Castro
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  • Thanks. I was browsing from releases.ubuntu.com and failed to locate those images. This option, of course, isn't quite correct if you've run the system update after the initial installation. – hsivonen Apr 20 '12 at 11:32
0

There's a couple issues in the accepted answer and with the linked better answer in Unix Stack Exchange. Here's an improved and tested script with comments:

#!/bin/bash

# ${Source} doesn't always show the source package name, ${source:Package} does.
# Multiple packages can have the same source, sort -u eliminates duplicates.
dpkg-query -f '${source:Package}\n' -W | sort -u | while read p; do
    mkdir -p $p
    pushd $p

    # -qq very quiet, pushd provides cleaner progress.
    # -d download compressed sources only, do not extract.
    apt-get -qq -d source $p

    popd
done

Run as non-root user (_apt works). Note any errors as they may indicate packages with no sources available. You may want to run the script with 2>err.log to parse these manually later.

Jonah Braun
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0

On Ubuntu refer to command:

apt-get source package-name

it is recommended that you only use apt-get source as a regular user, because then you can edit files in the source package without needing root privileges.

Bruno Pereira
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ResilientBit
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