pk41

Usage

Overview

pk4 resolves the specified argument(s) as either:

1. the name of a Debian binary package, and selects its Debian source package.

2. the name of a Debian source package, and selects it.

3. or a file path, and selects the Debian source package of the owning package.

The source package version is either the installed version (if any) or the installation candidate, as per apt-cache policy.

Then, pk4 downloads the entire selected source package (every file referenced by — and including — its .dsc file) and prints the output directory path.

Options

-allow_unauthenticated

Whether to allow unauthenticated source packages, i.e. disable signature checking.

-bin

Restrict search to binary packages only.

-complete

Whether to return shell completions. Should usually be set by shell completion functions only.

-dest string

Directory in which to store source packages (default ~/.cache/pk4).

-file

Interpret the argument as a file name and operate on the package providing the file.

-resolve_only

Resolve the provided arguments to source package and source package version, then print them to stdout in %s\t%s\n format and exit.

-shell string

Which shell to start in the output directory after downloading the source (default $SHELL)

-src

Restrict search to source packages only.

-verbose

Whether to print messages to stderr.

-version string

Use the specified source package version (default: installed package version, or latest known if not installed).

Examples

# Avail the current Linux kernel sources:

pk4 -src linux

# Avail the sources which produced Debian binary package libbz2-1.0 pk4 libbz2-1.0

# Avail the sources of whichever package currently provides vi: pk4 -file $(which vi)

# Fetch the i3 source, apply a bugfix, rebuild and replace installed packages: pk4 i3 patch -p1 < /tmp/myfix.patch pk4-replace

# Avail all debhelper build system implementations: pk4 -allow_unauthenticated $(grep '^dh-*' /var/cache/pk4/completion.both.txt) # Grep through their sources: grep -r option ~/.cache/pk4/dh-*

Configuration file

The following attributes can be configured in ~/.config/pk4/pk4.deb822:

Disk-Usage-Limit bytes

Example:

Disk-Usage-Limit: 2GiB

Hooks

The following hooks can be configured:

after-download

after-download hooks are run after the package was successfully downloaded. Examples:

# Automatically create a git repository for each package:
mkdir -p ~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/after-download/
ln -s /usr/share/pk4/hooks-available/after-download/git-init \
~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/after-download/

unpack

unpack hooks replace the unpack phase: as soon as one or more unpack hooks are found, pk4 will run them instead of running dpkg-source -x. Examples:

# Unpack source into a new git-buildpackage repository:
apt install git-buildpackage
mkdir -p ~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/unpack/
ln -s /usr/share/pk4/hooks-available/unpack/gbp \
~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/unpack/