6.13 How do I install a source package?

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