Arch Linux

Please read this before reporting a bug:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bug_reporting_guidelines

Do NOT report bugs when a package is just outdated, or it is in the AUR. Use the 'flag out of date' link on the package page, or the Mailing List.

REPEAT: Do NOT report bugs for outdated packages!
Tasklist

FS#45977 - [qemu] Split into per-architecture packages

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by felix (fstirlitz) - Thursday, 13 August 2015, 13:21 GMT
Last edited by Sébastien Luttringer (seblu) - Thursday, 20 August 2015, 09:51 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Sébastien Luttringer (seblu)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

The qemu package weighs 191.77 MiB, making it one of the largest packages in Arch (17th largest in [extra]). Most of that size (~133.20 MiB) is taken by the qemu-system-* binaries for the various guest architectures; another ~47.99 MiB is taken by the user-mode emulation binaries. However, not everyone is equally interested in emulating all the architectures. Take <https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=qemu>, which reports ~9500 installations for the x86 version versus ~5500 for other architectures.

qemu should be split into qemu-common, qemu-utils (containing qemu-io, qemu-img, qemu-nbd and qemu-ga) and per-guest-architecture packages.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Sébastien Luttringer (seblu)
Thursday, 20 August 2015, 09:51 GMT
Reason for closing:  Implemented
Additional comments about closing:  qemu 2.4.0-2
Comment by Sébastien Luttringer (seblu) - Thursday, 13 August 2015, 17:54 GMT
I have currently no opinion on that, except that we generally don't split packages too much in Arch.

How many per guest package do you suggest? There is propably way to group them (eg. mips).
Comment by felix (fstirlitz) - Monday, 17 August 2015, 13:28 GMT
I noticed. This coarse-grained packaging is one of my major annoyances with Arch, actually.

Preferably just one; I wouldn't mind having user-mode and full-platform binaries in one package.
Comment by Sébastien Luttringer (seblu) - Wednesday, 19 August 2015, 23:05 GMT
Pretty huge downsize:

$ sudo pacman -U libcacard-2.4.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz qemu-2.4.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
loading packages...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Package (2) Old Version New Version Net Change

libcacard 2.4.0-1 2.4.0-2 0.00 MiB
qemu 2.4.0-1 2.4.0-2 -176.42 MiB

Loading...