backports only exists for Debian stable and Debian oldstable, but not for Debian LTS suites. Since Bullseye is in LTS stage it no longer gets updated and will be archived at some point.
All uses of bullseye-backports in Puppet and container images need to be revisited, if there's an ongoing need for a package from bullseye-backports it should be moved to a dedicated repository component.
On 2025-07-22, bullseye-backports was archived, which uncovered that our bullseye base images still referenced it in sources.list. This breaks operations such as apt-get update in dependent image builds.
The work to identify packages that need moved to dedicated components or images that need updated to bookworm had already happened, and the fact that the source was left in the base image was just an oversight.
Current status:
As of ~ 02:00 UTC on 2025-07-23:
- bullseye-backports has been removed (r/1171716) from the bullseye base image
- the bullseye base image has been rebuilt (published as docker-registry.discovery.wmnet/bullseye:20250723, tagged latest)
- the php8.1 production images have been rebuilt (r/1171747) in order to expedite fixing MediaWiki image builds during scap deployments and a test deployment has been completed
Follow-up actions:
- A full production-images rebuild should be started in order to update dependent images other than php8.1. -- Decision: Unless anything urgent comes up, we'll just wait for the weekly rebuild.
- Affected CI images (e.g., in integration/config) should be rebuilt. -- Done by @dancy and @Jdforrester-WMF (r/1172093, r/1172111). Note that CI jobs that rely directly on the bullseye:latest image should already be fixed.
- r/1131630 should be revived to remove these now-broken-but-unused images. -- Done by @elukey (together with r/1171985).
Note: additional follow-up actions might be needed per history on T362518: Deprecate buster-backports.
Additional points of note:
- golang1.19 users: If you use the golang1.19 image as a builder in a multi-stage build, where the resulting binaries are copied into a bullseye-based image for production use, note that is has been updated from bullseye to bookworm (r/1131631). In order to avoid glibc errors in the resulting image due to mismatch between Debian versions, you will likely need to migrate your later-stage image to bookworm.