MOUNT.APTFS(1)

πŸ“¦ version 1.0.1, in debian bookworm, ubuntu jammy

πŸ’– MOUNT.APTFS(1) πŸ’–

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about mount.aptfs β€” it lives in the General Commands Manual section of your local man setup, and it's genuinely one of the cutest little FUSE situations you'll ever meet. πŸ¦‹


✨ NAME ✨

mount.aptfs β€” a FUSE filesystem that displays unpacked sources packages from APT. like, it shows you your source packages. as folders. slay. πŸ’…


🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

mount.aptfs mountpoint [options]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. you give it a mountpoint, you give it some options, it does the thing. πŸŽ€


πŸ‘‘ DESCRIPTION πŸ‘‘

so here's the tea, bestie. AptFs is a FUSE-based filesystem, and what it does is give you a whole view into your unpacked Debian source packages β€” the ones you grabbed with apt-get source β€” and it presents them to you as regular folders. like, just normal folders. iconic behaviour honestly.

and the binary packages? those don't get their own folders, no ma'am β€” they're modelled as symbolic links pointing right at their respective source package. 🫢 so you can follow the link and find your way home.

now, the part that's lowkey genius: AptFs keeps a sliding window of unpacked source packages. because bestie, think about it β€” it would not be very helpful if a command like:

% find /path/to/aptfs

went and unpacked the entire APT archive into your temporary directory. 😭 that's a whole catastrophe. imagine. so to tell it how many packages to keep unpacked at any one time, you pass the -o max_unpacked_packages=NUM option. there's your number, there's your window, everyone's happy. ✨


πŸ”’ SECURITY πŸ”’

okay so this is the part where we get serious for a sec, because it matters. πŸ‘€

by default, AptFs does not verify GPG signatures of source packages. and before you come for it β€” there's a reason, and the reason is that the large number of calls to GnuPG cause deadlocking in both AptFs and other programs using GnuPG. not just AptFs. everybody. deadlock city. πŸ’€ on top of that, GPG verification is also slow. so, yeah. that's the trade-off it's making out of the box.

but if you want verification back, you absolutely can have it β€” just pass -o secure=1 when mounting AptFs. your call, bestie. πŸŽ€

✍️ AUTHOR ✍️

AptFs and this manual page were written by Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>. king behaviour, honestly. πŸ‘‘

and for the legal girlies: this manual page is (C) 2008 by Chris Lamb and is licensed under the terms of the GPLv3 or higher. πŸ“œ


πŸ‘€ SEE ALSO πŸ‘€

go read those too, iykyk. πŸ¦‹


and that's the whole page, bestie β€” brought to you by the General Commands Manual, version March 14, 2008, filed under MOUNT.APTFS(1). mwah. πŸ’‹βœ¨

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