Re: base-apt: Inconsistent priorities between apt-cache and .deb data break offline builds

[Anton Mikanovich <amikan@ilbers.de>]

On 30/06/2026 16:24, 'MOESSBAUER, Felix' via isar-users wrote:
> Dear isar-devs,
>
> we noticed that cross-architecture offline builds are currently broken
> and single-architecture offline builds differ from the online
> variant. One failure pattern is the following, whereby the offline
> isar-mmdebstrap-host fails with an error message like this:
>
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   libtext-wrapi18n-perl : Depends: libtext-charwidth-perl but it is not
> installable
> E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
> E: The following information from --solver 3.0 may provide additional
> context:
>     Unable to satisfy dependencies. Reached two conflicting decisions:
>     1. libtext-wrapi18n-perl:amd64=0.06-10 is selected for install
>     2. libtext-wrapi18n-perl:amd64 Depends libtext-charwidth-perl
>        but none of the choices are installable:
>        [no choices]
>
> The root cause for this is that we ignore the upstream's repo priority
> overrides when creating the base-apt: reprepro includedeb records the
> priority from the .deb's own control field, and that becomes the
> priority published in base-apt's Packages index.
>
> When these priorities differ, the set of packages installed in offline
> mode are different from the ones in online mode. This per-se is plain
> wrong, but only surfaces if a now-required arch=all package depends on
> its architecture specific variant which never has been fetched (because
> the online bootstrap had access to the prio overrides). For non-cross
> builds the result is also different, which can be checked by comparing
> the SBOMs.
>
> There are HACKY ways to re-create the upstream priorities, but IMHO our
> approach for offline builds is problematic and should be changed:
> Instead of explicitly recreating the base-apt repo, we better just
> preserve the upstream apt lists and inject our downloads/deb dir into
> the apt cache that is used by the build. This would allow us to
> completely drop the base-apt.
Issues like that supposed to be fixed by "Improving base-apt usage" 
patchset.
It should address storing only needed packages, while DL_DIR is just a 
storage
for everything without storing any real packages state in it.
The idea is to have base-apt as an input, while isar-apt is used as an 
output.

We will look into the issue, starting from reproducing it.
>
> Reproducer:
>
> 1. kas-container menu, select qemuarm64 machine, build
> 2. mv build build-online && mkdir build && cp -rf build-
> online/downloads build/
> 3. kas-container build .config.yaml:offline.yml
>
> offline.yml:
> header:
>    version: 14
> local_conf_header:
>    offline: |
>      ISAR_USE_CACHED_BASE_REPO = "1"
>      BB_NO_NETWORK = "1"
Do we need such an option in kas menu?
>
> The initial report of this error is by Herbert.
>
> Best regards,
> Felix
>

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