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
