Package: qemuctl
Version: 0.3.1-4
Severity: minor
qemu 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.
qemuctl should depend on the first mode, i.e. system emulation,
and has nothing to do with the second, linux-user, emulation
of qemu.
It is enough, I think, to Depend on qemu-kvm, --
which is qemu with hardware-assisted system emulation,
which is almost-native (for a given CPU) variant.
We in qemu added Provides: qemu-kvm for a few packages
where it is appropriate, - for example, on x86_64 it
is qemu-system-x86 package, on s390x it is the package
with qemu-system-s390x binary (which again can do native
emulation of a s390x system) and so on.
Alternatively you can depend on qemu-system - which is
a meta-package which pulls in whole qemu system emulation
for all supported architectures. Or you can depend on
variation of particular architectures, something like:
Depends: qemu-system | qemu-system-x86 | qemu-system-arm | ...
-- with individual architectures being arm, mips, ppc,
sparc, s390x, x86 and misc.
The goal is to remove qemu metapackage entirely since
it pulls both modes of operations which is not what
users wants, as per the above description.
Thanks,
/mjt
