We in debian talked about splitting qemu-system into individual target packages for a long time, and there's a patch (almost current) to support it, in qemu-system-split-mjt branch of qemu debian git tree (I'll refresh it hopefully today).
I think it's time to decide whenever we want to do that or not. The idea is to provide qemu-system-x86, qemu-system-arm, etc, together with qemu-system-common (with common files if any), and qemu-system-misc for "miscellaneous" arches for which there was no separate package introduced. It was a long way there, and I'm still not certain if we really want to do that or not, but the current qemu-system is huge and has many non-trivial dependencies (various firmwares). 3 things which stopped me from doing this so far (besides the wheezy freeze - I wanted to do that after freeze, but no I don't think it is relevant anymore). First is the amount of new packages we introduce. Dunno if one huge package is worse or better than a lot of small packages. Here's the deal: qemu-kvm:i386 1.1.2: Installed-Size: 4756 Depends: seabios, vgabios, ipxe qemu-system:i386 1.3.0: Installed-Size: 89232 Depends: seabios, vgabios, ipxe, openbios-ppc, openbios-sparc, openhackware, libxen, ... Second, it isn't clear how -dbg packages should be handled. It is sometimes useful to have them, -- should we have one huge pkg with all debug info which breaks all qemu-system-* of "wrong" version, or should we have one dbg per target? And again, the size (or count of packages) is large. And 3rd, the qemu-system-misc thing - I wasn't clear for me how to handle targets going in/out of this package - I mean transitions, what to do when we'll want to split one arch out of -misc. This last one is - in my opinion - the most important one: transitions. And I don't really know how to do that in a nice and clean way... At least, when refreshing the branch (note it is volatile, ie, I rebase it on top of debian-experimental currently), I'll add Provides: qemu-system-$arch for all qemu-system-target, so that it will be possible for other packages to depend on particular arch they're interested, not whole qemu-system. And add this to current 1.3 branch as well. Comments? Thanks, /mjt
