Bug#1070204: gnome-boxes: Missing dependency on qemu-utils and libvirt-clients

[inasprecali]

Package: gnome-boxes
Version: 43.2-1
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: inasprecali at disroot.org

Dear Maintainer,

The problem is present on the gnome-boxes pacakge distributed in
the current Debian stable branch, Bullseye.  When creating a new
virtual machine with the "+" button on the upper left corner,
GNOME Boxes was hanging on the "Review and Create" menu, without
showing anything inside the popup window.

On a terminal, I saw the following messages:

Boxes-Message: 20:12:50.764: libvirt-machine.vala:268: Failed to connection to system libvirt: Unable to open qemu+unix:///system: Failed to connect socket to '/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock-ro': No such file or directory

(gnome-boxes:8952): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 20:12:50.820: ../../../gobject/gsignal.c:2722: handler '2749' of instance '0x561b3992a600' is not blocked

(gnome-boxes:8952): Boxes-WARNING **: 20:12:56.637: review-page.vala:44: Box setup failed: Failed to create volume: internal error: creation of non-raw file images is not supported without qemu-img.

(gnome-boxes:8952): Boxes-CRITICAL **: 20:12:56.637: boxes_assistant_review_page_populate: assertion 'machine != NULL' failed

I then installed the qemu-utils package, which contains the qemu-img command,
and the problem went away, with GNOME Boxes now proceeding on the
"Review and Create" menu and showing the options to select how much RAM and
disk space to allocate for the new virtual machine.

However, I also saw a message on the popup window, containing the following
text: "Virtualization extensions are unavailable on your system. Check your
BIOS settings to enable them.".  I found this odd, as I double checked that
I indeed had virtualization support enabled in my BIOS.

On the terminal, I saw the following messages:

libvirt-machine.vala:268: Failed to connection to system libvirt: Unable to open qemu+unix:///system: Failed to connect socket to '/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock-ro': No such file or directory

(gnome-boxes:5406): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 20:23:34.328: ../../../gobject/gsignal.c:2722: handler '2748' of instance '0x55a59ef865c0' is not blocked

(gnome-boxes:5406): Boxes-WARNING **: 20:23:40.894: util-app.vala:442: Failed to execute child process ?virsh? (No such file or directory)

I then installed the package libvirt-clients, which contains the virsh
command, and this problem too went away.

>From my observation, it seems that the gnome-boxes package should depend
(or at least recommend) the qemu-utils and libvirt-clients packages.
At the moment, gnome-boxes in Bullseye has no dependency on
either package, not "Depends", not "Recommends" and not "Suggests" either.

Since creating virtual machines is, in my opinion, an important feature
for a graphical frontend to virtualization software, I think gnome-boxes
should at least have a "Recommends" dependency on both libvirt-clients
and qemu-utils, if not a mandatory "Depends" relationship.

This is partially addressed in the testing branch (Trixie): there,
gnome-boxes does have a "Depends" on libvirt-clients, but still no
dependency of any kind on qemu-utils.

Thank you for your attention.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-20-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages gnome-boxes depends on:
ii  dconf-gsettings-backend [gsettings-backend]  0.40.0-4
ii  genisoimage                                  9:1.1.11-3.4
ii  libarchive13                                 3.6.2-1
ii  libc6                                        2.36-9+deb12u6
ii  libcairo2                                    1.16.0-7
ii  libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0                          2.42.10+dfsg-1+b1
ii  libglib2.0-0                                 2.74.6-2
ii  libgtk-3-0                                   3.24.38-2~deb12u1
ii  libgudev-1.0-0                               237-2
ii  libhandy-1-0                                 1.8.1-1
ii  libosinfo-1.0-0                              1.10.0-2
ii  libosinfo-bin                                1.10.0-2
ii  libsecret-1-0                                0.20.5-3
ii  libsoup-3.0-0                                3.2.2-2
ii  libspice-client-glib-2.0-8                   0.42-1
ii  libspice-client-gtk-3.0-5                    0.42-1
ii  libtracker-sparql-3.0-0                      3.4.2-1
ii  libusb-1.0-0                                 2:1.0.26-1
ii  libvirt-daemon                               9.0.0-4
ii  libvirt-glib-1.0-0                           4.0.0-2
ii  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0                          2.42.5-1~deb12u1
ii  libxml2                                      2.9.14+dfsg-1.3~deb12u1
ii  tracker                                      3.4.2-1

Versions of packages gnome-boxes recommends:
ii  qemu-system-x86  1:7.2+dfsg-7+deb12u5

Versions of packages gnome-boxes suggests:
pn  gnome-connections  <none>

-- no debconf information