Hacker News Reader

Comment by finnjohnsen2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know the strict offline use case for such ISOs, so put me in the 'sounds good to me' group. Being a 15+ year Ubuntu desktop user, rPis, and Ubuntu as preferred images everywhere I do cloud servers, I would rather resources be spent on these normal online things.

View on HN

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away, the sources of coding voodoo demanded distribution. But broadband internet was rare and you would die of old age waiting on dialup internet. So it was that the preferred method of source distribution and acquisition was CD-ROMs (and later DVDs) driven down the highway in a station wagon.

https://xkcd.com/2324/

But they should have a repo or something where you can get the sources of individual packages. Else it's a bit shady.

Of course you can get those with `apt-get source` or just grab them from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/ directly, e.g. look for .orig.tar.xz, .dsc and .debian.tar.xz files in http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/c/coreutils/. Not really sure who downloads all source in ISO form, seems rather pointless.

Ubuntu (like Debian) has always had online source repos available; they are in no way restricting access to sources here, just deprecating a legacy channel to deliver them. See `apt-get source` subcommand

They do. Source ISO images are a relic of the fact one of the ways sources would be distributed was on a physical CD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com