Package: nova-compute-qemu Version: 18.1.0-6 Severity: minor qemu package is a dummy metapackage which has no actual reason to exist. Qemu provides 2 entirely different modes of operations, it is a system-level emulation, where qemu emulates whole (hardware) system with its own CPU, memory subsystem, peripherial devices, BIOS/firmware etc. This is qemu-system, or, with hardware assistance, qemu-kvm. And another mode, where it can run linux programs built for different architecture on another linux system, for example to run arm linux binaries on an x86 linux. This is qemu-user and variations.
nova-compute-qemu works with qemu-system emulation mode. You can Depend either whole qemu-system and/or individual qemu-system-XXX (with XXX being arm, misc, mips, ppc, sparc, s390x and x86), but definitely not whole qemu. You can also depend on qemu-kvm which is provided by one of the arch- specific qemu-system packages (qemu-system-x86 on x86_64 and i386), - depending on what nova-compute-qemu actually does with it. For native hardware-assisted virtualization use qemu-kvm there. Also, are you sure you need qemu-block-extra dependency? Do you really depend on the additional block drivers included there? The goal is to remove `qemu' binary metapackage from Debian, because this package is not right, it is pulling whole qemu with all its modes of operations, - this is not what most people actually want, due to what's been said above. Thanks, /mjt
