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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Why? Have you ever used the source ISOs? They don't seem to be a very practical way of working with the sources, as opposed to downloading the source packages from the online repositories.

I don't like what Ubuntu have become but this does not look like a good reason for trashing it.

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At a previous company, we developer our own custom OS on top of Ubuntu [1], and patched a lot of components. I think getting the sources was the first step building our final product, so at a first glance, this is closing the doors making that (easily) possible.

[1]: https://github.com/balabit-deps

I can't remember precisely what is on the source ISOs, but if you are building a custom version of Debian you likely want the upstream package source plus the Debian changes to that (from things like dgit if the package maintainer uses it). Since these source ISOs didn't contain things like the snap packages you'd need other things anyway to start making a downstream distribution.

Did you read the article?

> The Ubuntu sources will remain available and this isn't anything about closing off that, but rather whether the merits and ongoing maintenance burden is worth it for assembling source ISOs.

Were you getting your sources from pre-packaged Ubuntu ISO images, though?

Because source code ISOs are the only thing that is proposed to be going away.

They're going to continue to distribute package sources the usual way, which is with apt.

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