build-dep firefox not working on Linux Mint

Question

I'm on the latest Linux Mint 12. In order to compile Firefox I need to do a

sudo apt-get build-dep firefox

which isn't working and showing the following error:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep firefox
[sudo] password for michael:
Reading package lists...
Done Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list

I remember that this worked out of the box in Ubuntu. Which URL do I need to specify in sources.list? Am I doing something else wrong?

Answer 1

Your installation only has sources for binary packages specified, it has no source for source packages. (Note that the word “source” has two different meanings here: a source package is a package containing source code (as opposed to a binary package containing ready-to-install code and data); a package source is a site from which you can download packages.)

Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list in a text editor. For each line that begins with deb, add a similar line that begins with deb-src. Be sure not to change anything else; in particular, if you use nano or another editor that wraps lines, take care not to introduce any extra line breaks.

For example, if the file looks like this (this is from Debian, the contents will be similar but have different names on Mint):

deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian squeeze main non-free contrib
## Security updates
deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

Then change it to:

deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian squeeze main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian squeeze main non-free contrib
## Security updates
deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

If you have files in the directory /etc/apt/sources.list.d, do the same with these files.