Bug 2456888 - Installing incus-agent installs the entire incus stack
Summary: Installing incus-agent installs the entire incus stack
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: incus
Version: 43
Hardware: x86_64
OS: Linux
unspecified
low
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Neal Gompa
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-04-09 12:58 UTC by Brian King
Modified: 2026-04-25 01:41 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

Fixed In Version: incus-6.23-3.fc45 incus-6.23-3.fc43 incus-6.23-3.fc42 incus-6.23-3.fc44
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2026-04-10 18:59:57 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Brian King 2026-04-09 12:58:55 UTC
Description of problem:

Installing incus-agent installs the entire incus stack. Per https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/incus-agent/incus-agent.1.en.html, incus-agent is a "daemon to be run inside virtual machines managed by Incus." 

Installing the agent on the VM guest should not install the entire incus platform.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
6.19.1

How reproducible:

Every time


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install incus-agent using dnf: `dnf -y install incus-agent`

Actual results:

The entire incus stack is installed:
```
Transaction Summary:
 Installing:        95 packages
```

Compare to package installation on Debian 13:
```
apt-get install incus-agent
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  liblockfile-bin liblockfile1
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  incus-agent
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,413 kB of archives.
After this operation, 15.1 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security/main amd64 incus-agent amd64 6.0.4-2+deb13u5 [4,413 kB]
Fetched 4,413 kB in 1s (3,653 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package incus-agent.
(Reading database ... 64311 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../incus-agent_6.0.4-2+deb13u5_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking incus-agent (6.0.4-2+deb13u5) ...
Setting up incus-agent (6.0.4-2+deb13u5) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.13.1-1) ...
```


Expected results:
Only the incus agent is installed

Additional info:

Comment 1 Carl George 🤠 2026-04-09 16:44:05 UTC
I'm not the maintainer, but I took a look at this and I see that incus-agent has an explicit dependency on incus, which I would guess is incorrect.  Here's a PR to change that.

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/incus/pull-request/11

That will reduce the dependencies somewhat, but I'll note that incus-agent still has nine recommends weak dependencies, which are installed by default and pull in a good number of other things.  You can trim that down even further with the flag `--setopt install_weak_deps=0` on a case by case basis.

Comment 2 Fedora Update System 2026-04-10 18:56:54 UTC
FEDORA-2026-9e8227d6dd (incus-6.23-3.fc45) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 45.
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-9e8227d6dd

Comment 3 Fedora Update System 2026-04-10 18:59:57 UTC
FEDORA-2026-9e8227d6dd (incus-6.23-3.fc45) has been pushed to the Fedora 45 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2026-04-10 19:09:09 UTC
FEDORA-2026-094b7621cf (incus-6.23-3.fc43) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 43.
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-094b7621cf

Comment 5 Fedora Update System 2026-04-10 19:09:10 UTC
FEDORA-2026-4481307278 (incus-6.23-3.fc42) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 42.
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-4481307278

Comment 6 Fedora Update System 2026-04-10 19:09:10 UTC
FEDORA-2026-22feefa810 (incus-6.23-3.fc44) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 44.
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-22feefa810

Comment 7 Reto Gantenbein 2026-04-11 08:21:24 UTC
Sorry for my late reply. Somehow my Web browsers are not very fond of the RHBZ authentication mechanisms so I'm rarely around here but as your PR was merged yesterday in rawhide I quickly wanted to express my concern.

This bug is a duplicate of #2421161.

I don't understand why the agent package must be installable on its own. In my opinion (I'm the original packager of Incus) it's clearly an extension to the incus base package. See e.g. how Gentoo is doing it [1]. No matter which approach will be chosen now the `recommends` on the agent subpackage is definitely wrong as qemu is likely not recommended if the agent should be installed standalone.

I recommend against stabilizing the package at it is now.

[1]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/aaa2da0f623783d98a6298da5798fa82e0d1f3fc#diff-f574a9a937f92b6dc4c8777a436f1182071b03a65b6b6ce13782746faaf6348bR215-R221

Comment 8 Fedora Update System 2026-04-12 16:13:20 UTC
FEDORA-2026-4481307278 has been pushed to the Fedora 42 testing repository.
Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command:
`sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2026-4481307278`
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-4481307278

See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.

Comment 9 Fedora Update System 2026-04-12 16:35:56 UTC
FEDORA-2026-22feefa810 has been pushed to the Fedora 44 testing repository.
Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command:
`sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2026-22feefa810`
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-22feefa810

See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.

Comment 10 Fedora Update System 2026-04-12 16:55:30 UTC
FEDORA-2026-094b7621cf has been pushed to the Fedora 43 testing repository.
Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command:
`sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2026-094b7621cf`
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-094b7621cf

See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.

Comment 11 Timothée Ravier 2026-04-17 08:43:19 UTC
I replied in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2421161#c4.

If you don't want this update to go to stable (and I agree that it's incomplete, a full fix would be what I described in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2421161), then you should vote -1 on the update in bodhi.

Comment 12 Fedora Update System 2026-04-20 00:46:07 UTC
FEDORA-2026-094b7621cf (incus-6.23-3.fc43) has been pushed to the Fedora 43 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 13 Fedora Update System 2026-04-20 01:06:03 UTC
FEDORA-2026-4481307278 (incus-6.23-3.fc42) has been pushed to the Fedora 42 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 14 Fedora Update System 2026-04-25 01:41:58 UTC
FEDORA-2026-22feefa810 (incus-6.23-3.fc44) has been pushed to the Fedora 44 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.


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