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Into: I like learning by reading sources. But it's tiring of searching them across internet splited on many many different project sites. I'd love to see central browsable repo with sources of many many apps in one place.

  • When someone want to find documentation of some Linux tool, best place is : man toolname.
  • When I want to browse Linux sources "on-demand" I can always jump to : Linux Cross Reference.
  • When I want to find most common staff, I can find all sources in Coreutils.
  • When I want to check how to build something, I can (for example) jump into http://www.archlinux.org/packages/ , check it's pkgbuild.

Is there any repo that holds sources of most of tools in one place ? - just like man holds documentation or Linux Cross Reference kernel sources.

I mean something for "rapid" "on-demand" checking how stuff is implemented. (Yes, I know google -> but I am tired of routine: 1. searching project site 2. browsing repo or even worse -> checking out it's repo 3. deleting when finished)

REMARK:

I've stressed out, I'd like to check tools : rapidly, fast, on-demand.

It means: I don't want to install whole app with it's sources just to take a look into it's sources. (btw. web resource is preferable, so I could check sources from many computers - I do not have admin on all of them)

Stephen Kitt
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Grzegorz Wierzowiecki
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2 Answers2

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Let me to respond to your question with a alternative answer. I guess you want read the code for the traditional Unix command line tools, not only the GNU version of these. Read the code of similar tools from different projects is a good practice for learning different ideas and implementations.

GNU has a nice web interface for the repo of coreutils: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git

The BSD family has similar web interfaces for the repos:

The BSD codebase is interesting because usually uses less code for the same tools, i.e.: only supports traditional options, no extra options, sh is a real shell and no just a link to other big shell (bash), etc. Tools similar to coreutils are within bin, sbin, usr.bin and usr.sbin.

You can also browse the same web interfaces if you want read the code for to build third party software (similar to arch's pkgbuild). NetBSD and DragonFly use pkgsrc from the NetBSD repo. OpenBSD and FreeBSD have these frameworks within their respective repos.

Other repos interesting for your purpose are:

Rufo El Magufo
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  • Great answer. Thanks you for encouraging for comparison - comparing different approaches is educative. Could you expand your answer with some Linux repo(s) ? BSD codebases are interesting, but I am afraid there might be important differences in syscall etc stuff, so Linux repos would be great addition to your list. – Grzegorz Wierzowiecki Jun 09 '12 at 21:47
  • One of the advantages of *BSD is that all the code is within one repo. The problem with Linux is that each package has a different origin. The coreutils repo (and the bash repo for the built-in functionality http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/) covers almost all the traditional tools. The "linux distro" repos only contain the framework for to build the third party packages and some patches, the repos don't contain real code (only contain the code for the distro's tools). – Rufo El Magufo Jun 09 '12 at 22:05
  • Respect to differences BSD vs Linux. The APIs are similar and habitually compatible with POSIX and other standards. The difference is the internal implementation of each API. In fact, tools from GNU works on *BSD and tools from *BSD works on Linux. E.g.: Debian ( http://packages.debian.org ) has some *BSD tools and the *BSDs have available coreutils and other GNU projects. – Rufo El Magufo Jun 09 '12 at 22:14
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As there is no central place for open source development there is no central repository containing most open source software. Some use GitHub, BitBucket, private servers, Sourceforge, Launchpad, etc. So this is a truly distributed environment and there is no immediate benefit of having one repository just copying the source.

On the other hand binary Distributions (shipping binaries instead of source code) typically provide the source for most of their packages and provide them to all users. So your best chance is to use the infrastructure provided by Distributions. Please be aware that they don't necessarily contain the latest changes and fixes and may be outdated.

Examples how to download a source package from your distribution:

yumdownloader --source packagename
apt-get source packagename

For Arch have a look at the answers at the answers for a similar question on stackoverflow.

If you just want do download the source code you could use packages.debian.org, e.g link for coreutils. This will provide an download link to the original package (orig.* or the cleanuped source for some packages dsfg.*). You could do the same with the Arch Linux package list, e.g: arch coreutils page. The Download from Mirror will download the package.

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Ulrich Dangel
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