Re: Intent to backport pyinstaller and pyinstaller-hooks-contrib

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Sat, 30 Aug 2025 23:25:49 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.backports.general
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<13834123.uLZWGnKmhe@soren-desktop>
On Saturday, August 30, 2025 11:01:11 PM Mountain Standard Time Paul Gevers 
wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On 30-08-2025 21:40, Soren Stoutner wrote:
> 
> > Because pyinstaller is a
> > package that moves quickly upstream, and because of how pyinstaller needs
> > to
> > be updated to correctly interact with other packages, trixie users of
> > pyinstaller will usually want to be running a current version from
> > backports.
> 
> 
> I hope there's still significant value for the version in stable? This 
> sounds a bit like this package shouldn't be in stable and rather 
> provided via fastrack [1]? backports is not meant to fix issues in 
> stable, but rather to deliver new features.

That is exactly what this is doing.  It is adding new features.  Specifically, 
it is adding an understanding of versions of other Python programs that are 
newer than what was released with stable.

If you are not already, it would be helpful to understand what Pyinstaller 
does.

https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/

Pyinstaller is a development tool, in some ways like a compiler.  If it is 
being used to develop software with Python modules that are newer than what 
was released in stable, it needs to have updated knowledge of them.  The 
purpose of stable-backports is to allow the developers to program in a stable 
environment but target their programs to newer environments.

Of software in general use, it is probably most like a web browser.  Just like 
we have web browsers in stable, so we have Pyinstaller in stable.  Web browser 
have to interact with a large number of web servers running a large amount of 
software, and the standards relating to those other pieces of software doesn’t 
stand still.

Likewise, Pyinstaller interacts with a large number of other Python packages.  
*If you are only using it to package the version of Python programs that exist 
in stable, then you will be perfectly happy with the version in stable.*  But, 
if you are using it to package Python programs that have been introduced since 
stable, or to packages newer versions of Python programs than those in stable, 
then you will want the version from stable-backports.

In other words, this is being introduced to stable-backports not because the 
program needs to be updated for itself, but because the primary purpose of the 
program is to interact with a whole ecosystem of other programs.

This is similar to how you often need to update a browser to something newer 
than stable to interact with newer websites, but if you only interact with 
websites that stay the same as they were when stable was released, you are 
fine to continue to run the browser that shipped with stable.

Regarding Fast Track, the website says:

"Debian Fast Track is a repository that allows making “backports” of packages 
available to users of the stable distribution, if those packages cannot be 
maintained in testing and backported in the usual way.”

I don’t think that applies because Pyinstaller can be maintained in testing 
and backported in the usual way.

Hope that helps.  Pyinstaller truly is different than most software in terms 
of how it is used, so I can see why this wouldn’t be immediately obvious.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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