On Wed, 4 Mar 2026, Stefan Monnier wrote:
If I want to build a trixie-backports package, and that must depend on
another package in backports, then being able to specify:
dependency/trixie-backports
with or without a version and have apt build-dep install from backports,
seems less of a burden than just specifying the version and forcing the
person building the package to work out what to do to build it.
Presumably you say "must depend on another package in backports" because
you've discovered that the version of that other package in Trixie is
too old, and that version in backports is not. Along the way, you have
most likely seen both version numbers, so "work out what to do to build
it" doesn't seem like it would be much trouble.
IOW, I must be missing something.
Just that
apt-get build-dep mypackage
fails telling you that the package depends on 2.3 but 2.1 will be
installed.
And, afaict, there's no way to resolve this other than either manually
installing the package using the /backports syntax or adding a pin so
that the backports package will install by default.
Come back to it in three years time and it won"t necessarily be obvious
that building the package depends on backports at all.
Tim.
