AptPkg::Source(3pm)

💖 AptPkg::Source 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the AptPkg::Source page 💅 this one lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation bunch (manual section 3pm, if u were wondering), and it's literally the Perl door into apt's source package situation. come thru ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

AptPkg::Source — the APT source package interface 🫶

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

use AptPkg::Source;

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

The AptPkg::Source module provides an interface to APT's source package lists. periodt.

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💅 AptPkg::Source

The AptPkg::Source package implements the APT pkgSrcRecords class as a hash reference (it inherits from AptPkg::hash). The hash is keyed on source or binary package name, and the value is an array reference of the details of matching source packages. iconic behaviour honestly.

⚠️ not me needing to tell u this: there is no iterator class, so it is not possible to get a list of all keys (with keys or each). sad but true, no cap 😭

🧚 Constructor

• new([SOURCELIST]) — Instantiation of the object uses configuration from the $AptPkg::Config::_config object (which is automatically initialised if it hasn't been done explicitly, so don't stress 💖).

If no SOURCELIST is specified, then the value of Dir::Etc::sourcelist from the configuration object is used (generally /etc/apt/sources.list).

🌈 Methods

• find(PACK, [SRCONLY]) — In a list context, return a list of source package details for the given PACK, which may either be a source package name, or the name of one of the binaries provided (unless SRCONLY is provided and true).

In a scalar context, the source package name of the first entry is returned.

• get, exists — These methods are used to implement the hashref abstraction: $obj->get($pack) and $obj->{$pack} are equivalent 👯

The get method has the same semantics as find, but returns an array reference in a scalar context.

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The list returned by the find (and get) methods consists of hashes which describe each available source package (in order of discovery from the deb-src files described in sources.list). lowkey elegant.

Each hash contains the following entries:

• Package, Version, Maintainer, Section — strings giving the source package name, version, maintainer and section.
• AsStr — the full source record as a string in Debian control file syntax <https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-controlsyntax>, which is an RFC822-like set of key-value pairs with the values potentially wrapped. It is relatively trivial to parse:

my %fields = map { split /:\s+/ } split /\n(?! )/, $as_str;

• Binaries — a list of binary package names from the package.
• BuildDepends — a hash describing the build dependencies of the package. Possible keys are:

"Build-Depends", "Build-Depends-Indep", "Build-Conflicts",
"Build-Conflicts-Indep".

The values are a list of dependencies/conflicts with each item being a list containing the package name followed optionally by an operator and version number.

Operator values evaluate to a comparison string* (>, >=, etc) or one of the AptPkg::Dep:: constants in a numeric context (see "pkgCache::Dep::DepCompareOp" in AptPkg(3pm)).

*Note that this is a normalised, rather than Debian-style (>> vs >) string. yes bestie, the string is normalised, don't come for me 🙈

• Files — a list of files making up the source package, each described by a hash containing the keys:

"Checksum-FileSize", "MD5Hash", "SHA256", "Size", "ArchiveURI",
"Type".

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

AptPkg::Config(3pm), AptPkg::Cache(3pm), AptPkg(3pm), AptPkg::hash(3pm).

the whole friend group fr fr 💜

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org> — king behaviour, we stan 👑

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and that's the whole page bestie, we ate and left no crumbs 🍓 this was perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-19 — go forth and read ur sources 💖✨