Support for Ubuntu LTS releases

[gaby]

I'm interesting in using age but noticed that it's only available in Ubuntu 21.04, are there any plans to add-it to Ubuntu latest LTS release (20.04 Focal)?

[FiloSottile]

You can use the binary downloads (https://dl.filippo.io/age/latest?for=linux/amd64) on any version of Ubuntu, but I don't think Ubuntu does backports of new packages to older versions. You can try opening a bug with them, though!

[gaby]

Yeah, you are right. Ubuntu won't allow new packages for a LTS already released.

One way of getting packages into older Ubuntu releases is through Launchpad.net. That's the way that the Ansible team does it. They are registered as a team in Launchpad which allows them to create a PPA (Personal Package Archive).

Example of Ansible PPA:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

[FiloSottile]

I would probably set up a PPA (also as a way to get the latest version on LTS releases) if someone contributed a PR for a GitHub Actions workflow that publishes the package 👍

[alerque]

I haven't seen that done. It would also be a little dodgy because PPAs expect packages to be GPG signed, and doing that in CI is always a compromise. That being said perhaps it doesn't matter much what key is used to sign and hence it can be a semi-disposable one just for the purpose. I'll keep my eyes on this issue though — if somebody does come up with (or points out) such a workflow I would love to copy it for another project where I tediously bump packages in a PPA by hand across 4 Ubuntu releases.

[gaby]

It seems no one has publish an action for doing this. From what I found it requires using dput as stated here.

For example:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Run Install Commands
        run: |
          sudo apt-get install devscripts dput

[FiloSottile]

If someone were to compromise my GitHub account, we'd have bigger problems :)