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

[Michael Tokarev]

On 23.05.2026 19:06, Simon McVittie wrote:
...
> 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, ...

That's already the case.  qemu-system-common is only built if any
of qemu-system-$arch is built.  But I don't think it will help much.
Because while 32bit systems was a major difference, there's no other
similar changes expected.  So far we assume qemu-system is available
on all 64bit architectures.  I think it is barely practical.

BTW, (*-)Depends: qemu-system-common is a tough one.  The prob here
is that qemu-system-common itself depends on one of qemu-system-foo
packages, - due to old request from ubuntu.  I think I now got rid
of this dependency, but it was there for quite some time.

> 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.)

Yes, I'd suggest build-depending on architecture-is-64-bit, or to list
architectures explicitly.

Thanks,

/mjt

> 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.

I guess it's just tip of an iceberg.  There are much more packages
involved.  I'm filing more bugs like this one, for inter-inter-deps..

Thanks,

/mjt