UNIX distributions used to come with the system source code
in /usr/src
. This is a concept which fascinates me: if you want
to change something in any part of your system, just make your change in the
corresponding directory, recomile, reinstall, and you can immediately see your
changes in action.
So, I decided I wanted to build a tool which can give you the impression of
that, without the downsides of additional disk space usage and slower update
times because of /usr/src
maintenance.
The result of this effort is a tool called pk4
(mnemonic: get me
the package for…) which I just uploaded to Debian.
What distinguishes this tool from an apt source
call is the
combination of a number of features:
apt policy
) will be used.
If you don’t want to wait for the package to clear the NEW queue, you can get it from here in the meantime:
wget https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/pk4/pk4_1_amd64.deb sudo apt install ./pk4_1_amd64.deb
You can find the sources and issue tracker at https://github.com/Debian/pk4.
Here is a terminal screencast of the tool in action, availing the sources of i3, applying a patch, rebuilding the package and replacing the installed binary packages: