[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#912725: Bug#912725: virtinst: Please demote virtinst recommends on virt-viewer to suggests

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 10:47:53PM +0100, Guido Günther wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 01:27:11PM -0800, Matt Taggart wrote:
> > Interestingly, the virt-manager package only Suggests virt-viewer but, if
> > anything, I would think the dependency would be stronger there? So maybe
> > Recommends or even Depends? But I guess it's possible to use virt-manager to
> > manage VMs without ever needing to launch virt-viewer, so maybe Suggests is
> > correct there as well.
> 
> virt-manager merely suggests virt-viewer since it's basically a useful
> tool to have too (virt-manager doesn't need virt-viewer to show any
> consoles) so a very weak relation makes sense

Agreed, virt-manager can do pretty much everything virt-viewer can
and loads more, so the Suggests makes sense there.

> virtinst recommends virt-viewer so people installing it get a set of
> tools to install VMs and connect to their UI so a stronger relation
> looks justified to me.
> 
> It's not a dependency as (as you note) there are use cases where it
> works without virt-viewer but the default should (in my opinion) be
> to have a working set and not let the user figure out why they can't
> connect to their VMs UI.

I would also like to see the Recommends demoted to a Suggests.

One of the primary use cases of virt-install is setting up headless
guests on a headless host, and the additional dependencies get in the
way there. Plus virt-install provides good, actionable feedback for
those cases where having virt-viewer available would actually make
things better:

  WARNING  Unable to connect to graphical console: virt-viewer is not
           installed. Please install the 'virt-viewer' package.

Note additionally that Debian seems to be in the minority here: I
checked Fedora, openSUSE, Arch and Alpine, and for none of those
virt-viewer is dragged in along with virt-install.

Can we please reconsider this?

-- 
Andrea Bolognani <eof at kiyuko.org>
Resistance is futile, you will be garbage collected.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-libvirt-maintainers/attachments/20250204/41158af7/attachment.sig>