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I'm trying to backport mailman3-full from Debian Bullseye to Debian Buster. I've followed the official guide, but when executing sudo mk-build-deps --install --remove I get an error:

Removing mailman3-build-deps:amd64 because I can't find python3-importlib-resources:amd64

I've researched that package, and apparently it's only found on Bullseye (testing), so I can't just install it. How should I proceed to backport mailman3-full? Maybe I also have to backport python3-importlib-resources?

I've also tried adding testing repositories and just installing mailman3-full from there, but then it wants to upgrade a lot of packages to the testing version, which I'm not comfortable with.

dieortin
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Yes, you should backport python3-importlib-resources, and any other dependencies which aren’t already available in stable or backports.

In this particular case, python3-importlib-resources doesn’t need anything else, but mailman3 needs setuptools-scm and zope.interface to be backported, and the latter needs a few dependencies of its own...

Stephen Kitt
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  • Thanks! Is there the possibility of `python3-importlib-resources` requiring other python3 packages from testing, making me essentially backport hundreds of packages? – dieortin Apr 04 '21 at 22:01
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    @dieortin yes, that is always a possibility when back-porting packages. you need to backport all required dependencies....and then the required dependencies of those dependencies, and so on. If it turns out that you'll need to back-port half the OS (or newer versions of essential packages like libc6) then either give up or switch to running either testing or unstable. Some backporting jobs are far more trouble than they're worth. – cas Apr 05 '21 at 03:28
  • @cas thank you, that seems to be the case... I've given up after backporting like 10 different python packages. I'm not sure if running testing on a "production" (not critical, but still) server is a good idea, I think I'm going to try with docker containers – dieortin Apr 05 '21 at 14:08
  • Using a container system like docker or lxc or systemd-nspawn is a good approach for situations like that. or a VM. – cas Apr 06 '21 at 01:19