Bug#1137353: qemu dropped support for 32bit hosts but gnome-boxes depends on it

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 23 May 2026 at 00:26:52 +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
>On 23.05.2026 00:22, Jeremy Bícha wrote:
>>On Fri, May 22, 2026 at 5:07 PM Michael Tokarev <mjt at tls.msk.ru> wrote:
>>>Please remove qemu from [gnome-boxes] dependencies
>>
>>I could stop building gnome-boxes for 32-bit architectures (and ensure
>>it's removed there) instead.

I think that's the correct answer here. Removing the dependency isn't 
going to do anything useful: gnome-boxes is basically a qemu frontend.

For the future, would the qemu maintainers be willing to promise that 
qemu-system-common will continue to exist on the architectures where 
qemu-system-* are built, and only on those architectures? That way, we 
would be able to

     Build-Depends: ..., qemu-system-common, ...

and that way, gnome-boxes would automatically be buildable on every 
architecture where qemu-system-* are built, but without being uselessly 
buildable on architectures that are not yet supported by qemu; also 
without needing to duplicate the list of qemu architectures in 
gnome-boxes' source code, and also without buildds needing to install 
the actual qemu (which is only required at runtime, not at build-time).

(But because an older version of qemu-system-common currently still 
exists as "cruft" on armhf and i386, we'll also need a short-term 
workaround to make it unbuildable on those two architectures, like a 
Build-Depends on unsupported-architecture [armhf i386] or a 
Build-Depends on architecture-is-64-bit.)

This technique might be useful for libvirt and libvirt-dbus, too.

After uploading a version of gnome-boxes that doesn't build on armhf and 
i386, we'll need to ask the archive team to remove the old 
gnome-boxes:i386 and gnome-boxes:armhf binaries, and a similar request 
will be necessary to remove qemu*:i386 and qemu*:armhf packages that are 
no longer built, and probably similar for libvirt and libvirt-dbus. 
And then, after all that cleanup, qemu will finally be able to migrate.

>If you consider dropping building gnome-boxes on 32bit architectures,
>maybe it is a good idea to watch for reverse dependencies

I've uploaded a new version of meta-gnome making gnome-devel only depend 
on gnome-boxes on supported architectures.

(But in fact gnome-devel was already not installable on at least i386, 
because sysprof is no longer built on i386; fixed that too.)

     smcv