#1146845 /etc/qemu-ifup has an undeclared dependency on net-tools

Package:
qemu-system-common
Source:
qemu-system-common
Description:
QEMU full system emulation binaries (common files)
Submitter:
Richard Kettlewell
Date:
2026-09-07 08:19:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1146845#5
Date:
2026-09-06 09:59:11 UTC
From:
To:
qemu-system-common's /etc/qemu-ifup depends on ifconfig from net-tools,
but this dependency is not declared anywhere.

The effect is that VM networking can break (without any diagnostice that
I ever found) if net-tools is not installed. This is a reasonable
configuration since it is largely supplanted by iproute2.

Either the package should declare the dependency, or qemu-ifup should be
rewritten to use ip(8).

$ dpkg -L qemu-system-common|xargs grep ifconfig 2>/dev/null
/etc/qemu-ifup:   ifconfig "$1" 0.0.0.0 up
$ sha256sum /etc/qemu-ifup
d4fd5cf3e6c293bec0ccbffd73b10d960d62ad65fa5e5cbd5fbad0a9661d40c8
/etc/qemu-ifup
$ dpkg -s qemu-system-common | grep net-tools
$ dpkg -S /usr/sbin/ifconfig
net-tools: /usr/sbin/ifconfig

ttfn/rjk
#1146845#10
Date:
2026-09-07 07:38:58 UTC
From:
To:
I think this is wrong, in fact. Although installing net-tools got my VM
networking working again, it has now broken again. So I think there is
some other issue.

Apologies for the bad report.

ttfn/rjk