How to enable "backports" for a given release name?

[sarnold]

Eg, how would I build a package for bookworm and enable bookworm backports? I'm trying to build a python package that uses hatchling which is fairly new. Thanks for any feedback (and thanks for this action!).

The current version of my workflow is here.

[jtdor]

Hi @sarnold.

First of all (this would be the easiest solution): For “hatchling”, I only found python3-hatchling, which seems to already be available in bookworm, not bookworm-backports. Is this the package you are looking for?

If not, about using backports or any other additional repository:
Currently (more on that at the end), there is no “high level” way to include additional repositories, like e.g. sbuild has it. But fortunately, since the action utilizes Docker containers, you can customize a number of things if required (This is not necessarily intended, but a side-effect of using Docker containers):

In your case, you could pass one of debian:stable-backports or debian:bookworm-backports to the action’s docker-image parameter. These images have backports readily added to their sources.list, as the name suggests.

Since backports by default have a low priority, you might (maybe try the above first) be required to additionally adjust priorities (this is the not so handy part). For that, you could place a small Dockerfile in your Git repo and use it for the package build. As an example:

FROM debian:bookworm-backports

RUN printf '\
Package: package-from-backports another-package-from-backports \n\
Pin: release o=Debian Backports \n\
Pin-Priority: 500 \n\
' >/etc/apt/preferences

Then use this Dockerfile with the docker-image parameter:

docker-image: repo/path/to/Dockerfile

See the corresponding test as an example.

Coming back to using additional APT repositories in general: I have a dormant branch about adding such a feature. There was also a recent PR by @leonheldattoradex about the idea—which I unfortunately totally did not find time and missed to reply to (sorry, @leonheldattoradex). I will take your question and @leonheldattoradex’s PR as a hint that using additional repos is a nice-to-have feature and look into it soon, hopefully next week :-)

[ofek]

FYI I have a section in the installation docs that shows Hatchling availability in distros https://hatch.pypa.io/dev/install/#build-system-availability

[jwarnier]

It is my understanding that you could just use https://github.com/jtdor/build-deb-action?tab=readme-ov-file#extra-repos to set the backports repo, and then use something like apt-opts: -t bookworm-backports to use it.

[jwarnier]

BTW, this actually not an issue, but rather a discussion, so could also be turned into one, as you did before, @jtdor.