Chapter 6. Basics of the Debian package management system

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6.13 How do I install a source package?

Debian source packages can't actually be  installed , they are just unpacked in whatever di 

rectory you want to build the binary packages they produce.

Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can obtain the binary

packages. If you set up your APT's

sources.list(5)

to include the appropriate  deb src 

lines, you'll be able to easily download any source packages by running

apt get source foo

To help you in actually building the source package, Debian source package provide the so 

called build dependencies mechanism. This means that the source package maintainer keeps

a list of other packages that are required to build their package. To see how this is useful, run

apt get build dep foo

before building the source.

6.14 How do I build binary packages from a source package?

You will need all of foo_*.dsc, foo_*.tar.gz and foo_*.diff.gz to compile the source (note: there

is no .diff.gz for some packages that are native to Debian).

Once you have them (`How do I install a source package?' on this page), if you have the

dpkg dev

package installed, the following command:

dpkg source  x foo_version revision.dsc

will extract the package into a directory called

foo version

.

If you want just to compile the package, you may cd into

foo version

directory and issue

the command

dpkg buildpackage  rfakeroot  b

to build the package (note that this also requires the

fakeroot

package), and then

dpkg  i ../foo_version revision_arch.deb

to install the newly built package(s).