Research ways to distribute source

Let’s first list pros & cons of the various solutions in more details.

Possible implementations

live-build —source

live-build’s --source option allows to build a source image corresponding to the binary image that is being built. The default source image format is tar.

It would not be too much work to upload such a source image along with a newly released Tails ISO. On the other hand:

• our sometimes scarse upload bandwidth would feel even more painful that it currently does;
• on the long run, doing this without any de-duplication would waste big amounts of storage space, especially considering a big set of packages is shared between quite a few Tails releases, during a given Debian stable release life-cycle.

reprepro

Our own APT repository uses reprepro. reprepro knows how to partially mirror APT repositories, so we could use it to inject, at release time, the needed list of source packages.

direct offer of source upon request

See Finnix and GPL compliance.

The relevant parts of the GPL are section 3(b) of the GPLv2 and section 6(b) of the GPLv3.

grml source-report

See their Gitweb, especially the get_sources script. Seems clever, as usual.

Parent Task: #5987 (closed)

Related issues

• Related to #10748 (closed)
• Follows #5681 (closed)

Original created by @tails on 5548 (Redmine)