Virtual Machine Manager vs. dependencies

Rocky Linux General
1

Hi,

On my OpenSUSE (Leap and Tumbleweed) desktop clients, I’ve regularly installed the Virtual Machine Manager GUI (virt-manager package) to manage various Linux guests that are running on remote hypervisors. The package only pulls in a handful of dependencies.

Now when I try to install virt-manager on Rocky Linux (or any RHEL clone), it pulls in nearly all the libvirt and qemu related packages.

As far as I can tell, this is wrong. Users should be able to install virt-manager separately and independently from all this stuff. I wonder if I should file a bug report on this.

2

Which version of RHEL and are you sure ? - I recently installed 8.5 and installed virt-manager, then upgraded to 8.6, had some issues with virtualisation and discovered I didn’t have libvirt installed.

3

[quote=“bobar, post:2, topic:7652, full:true”]
Which version of RHEL and are you sure ?[/quote]

Rocky Linux 8.6. And yes, I’m sure.

4

On AlmaLinux 8.6:

[AL8]$ dnf -q rq --requires virt-manager --resolve | grep -v i686
dconf-0:0.28.0-4.el8.x86_64
gtk-vnc2-0:0.9.0-2.el8.x86_64
gtk3-0:3.22.30-10.el8.x86_64
gtksourceview3-0:3.24.9-1.el8.x86_64
libvirt-glib-0:3.0.0-1.el8.x86_64
platform-python-0:3.6.8-47.el8_6.alma.x86_64
python3-gobject-0:3.28.3-2.el8.x86_64
spice-gtk3-0:0.38-6.el8.x86_64
virt-manager-common-0:3.2.0-4.el8.alma.noarch
vte291-0:0.52.4-2.el8.x86_64

[AL8]$ dnf -q rq --requires virt-manager --tree | grep "  ._ " | grep -Fv "|   |" | grep -v i686 | wc -l
90

[AL8]$ dnf -q rq --requires virt-manager --resolve --recursive | grep -v i686 | wc -l
560

And “dnf install virt-manager” on rather minimal (VM) would install 193 packages.

Aww, grep did not like me with repoquery’s tree. Nevertheless, there are plenty of dependencies, including:

[AL8]$ dnf install virt-manager | grep -cE "libvirt|qemu"
n
Operation aborted.
36

I’d guess that dependencies are mostly inherited from RHEL?

5

Well that would be interesting because RHEL thinks it’s deprecated.