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 <[email protected]> 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
