18.02.2018 01:27, Krylov Michael wrote: > Package: qemu-system > Version: 1:2.1+dfsg-12+deb8u6 > Severity: minor > > Hello! > > Right now qemu-system lists all the architectures qemu supports as > Depends. This results in installation of a dozen of emulators where most > people only need one. > > Of course you can install a particular emulator, but most packages, like > qemubuilder or qemuctl depend on qemu-system, so they basically want to > install all the architectures.
There aren't that many packages which depend on qemu-system. Actually there's just one, which is qemubuilder. This one can depend on particular qemu architecture if needed, and suggest/recommend others, based on their knowledge of how it is used most. qemuctl depends on qemu, and as far as I can tell, is an old package which hasn't been updated since 2011, and appears to be dead. It can be made to depend on particular qemu-system package which it uses, or just dropped from Debian. just like qemu-launcher. There are a few other packages which depend on qemu (2 or 3), and I guess it is wrong, they actually need to depend on particular _part_ of qemu, not _whole_ qemu. For example, nova-compute-qemu (it definitely needs some of qemu-system-*, I've no idea which one) and os-autoinst (I can't say what it actually needs). In all cases it is the other package's job to list actual dependencies, because we on qemu side don't know anything about how these packages use qemu. Either way, I don't see why we should think what "most people" need. The way you suggest to handle this is definitely wrong, since, for example, on aarch64 they actually need qemu-system-arm most often, not qemu-system-x86. And once again, the packages which uses qemu are the ones to choose. qemu-system package is historical. Once upon a time there was just one package, qemu, which included everything. Now it is a transitional package, split into qemu-system and qemu-user. And later on, qemu-system has been split into several arch-specific packages, and qemu-system become mostly transitional, just like qemu itself. No one actually want to install "qemu" package, because it is quite rare to need everything of it. No one actually want to install qemu-system either, once again, because they only need one particular architecture, but we don't really know which one. And I seriously thinking about dropping qemu-system and qemu packages entirely. So I think the whole point is a bit moot... Thanks, /mjt
