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roro
Asked: 2016-10-04 11:27:58 +0800 CST

What does enabling sources in ubuntu's software & updates utility do?

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I'm attempting to install emacs 25.1 on my ubuntu 16.04 system from a PPA. When attempting to install the build dependencies I got the error

>sudo apt-get build-dep emacs24
Reading package lists... Done
E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list

So apt-get can't find the dependencies, right? I thought adding the PPA to my system would solve this but it doesn't. Also, uncommenting the deb and deb-src pairs (individually and everything at once) in /etc/apt/sources.list didn't help.

What does help is checking the source box in the software & updates utility, as suggested in this post: https://askubuntu.com/a/795694/524588 does work. What exactly is this doing, and how can I replicate it without the gui?

16.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Enabling sources allows downloading source code of the application. With apt-get source pkg you can get source code of that package

    As Mitch explains in his answer:

    The command sudo apt-get build-dep packagename means to install all dependencies for 'packagename' so that I can build it". So build-dep is an apt-get command just like install, remove, update, etc.

    So essentially, build-dep will grab source code of your package, and try to install dependencies for it first , before actually building package. This is different from install where the package may already be in .deb package, with everything pre-made.

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