Digby Tarvin wrote:
This is a question from somebody who is just testing the water with the gentoo distribution.. probably basic, but I couldn't see the answer in the documentation or faq so...
First some background - I am a long time user of the BSD/OS flavour of BSD Unix (since the days when Minix was the only open source *nix), and over the last 2-3 years have dabbled with Red Hat and SuSE Linux distributions because of the better hardware support and availability of 3rd party software like vmware...
However I was not keen on the Microsoft style GUI based system install and administration used in both distros, which seemed to assume that the packager knew best, and the user doesn't need to understand what is going on 'under the hood'.
I also missed my readily available sourcode on my BSD system. The Linux distros did not default to loading the source onto the disk, and when sources were installed, I did not find it simple or intuitive to locate them and know how to rebuild my binaries from them.
On my BSD system, if I wanted to find the source for /usr/bin/foo, I knew I could just 'cd /usr/src/usr.bin/foo' and that was the directory containing the source. To rebuild everything related to that application, I just typed 'make' in that directory...
I liked what I had heard about gentoo being built from source, implying that the source for every binary on the system should be accessible.
However after going through the install process, the only sources which I can find in an expected place are the kernel sources.
So the question is, how to I go about making sure that the sources that my system is built from reside on my disk, and how do I find them? I really want to be able to access the source whenever I want (it is the only way I find to work around the often incomplete documentation on Linux systems) not just when I have an Internet connection available.....
After all, the only reason I really want to sit around and wait for a compile and build everytime I install a new package is so that I can be sure that the binary I am running corresponds to the source that I have.
Regards, DigbyT
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