Bug#992950: qemu-web-desktop wrongly depends on qemu

Michael Tokarev mjt at tls.msk.ru
Wed Aug 25 13:39:44 BST 2021


Package: qemu-web-desktop
Version: 21.08.10-1
Severity: important

The "qemu-web-desktop" depends on "qemu" package.
This is completely wrong, especially since it list
"qemu-system-x86" in the same place.

In the long past, when qemu first appeared in Debian,
there was just one binary package, named qemu, which
contained everything. Later on, it has been split at
least to full system emulation package (qemu-system)
and to user-level emulation package (qemu-user and
qemu-user-static), with "qemu" becoming a metapackage
and depending on everything.

But later on it has become clear that installing whole
qemu is useless. So "qemu" package become a dummy empty
package with nothing in it and no dependencies.

Many bugs has been filed against numerous packages which
listed "qemu" in various dependencies, and most of them
has been fixed by now.

But it seems some new packages emerged which again list
qemu as one of dependencies.

Please remove "qemu" from Depends. You don't need the dummy
listed there, and it seems you don't need all user emulation
if "qemu" were dependent on qemu-user*.

Also please decide what qemu dependency you actually want.

Note the #989638 too. I don't know what you actually want
for this package, - you initially listed qemu-kvm as a
dependency (which has been a dummy package too for a few
debian releases), - maybe this is actually right and you
want a package only on those architectures where native
kvm mode is available (which are definitely not all).

Also, while at it, maybe you can arrange to remove
bridge-utils dependency too? "bridge" utility in the
iproute2 package (which is always installed together
with networking) has all the needed functionality and
more, and supports modern features of the linux kernel,
such as vlan-aware bridge which is very handy in the
qemu-system context.

Marking as severity:important since I really need to
get rid of qemu for a long time.

Thanks,

/mjt



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