[elrepo] RHEL 9.2 bpftool replaces elrepo's?

[Phil Perry]

On 11/05/2023 17:49, Joseph Christopher Sible wrote:
> I just noticed that when I upgraded to RHEL 9.2, its bpftool version is now 7.0.0 instead of being the same as the kernel version, so it now gets installed instead of the one from the ELRepo kernel repository, even when using an ELRepo kernel. Is this supposed to have happened? If so, should we drop bpftool from the ELRepo kernel repository? If not, then should something be changed to make ours install instead of theirs, and should I use dnf priorities or excludes to make that happen on my systems in the meantime?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Joseph C. Sible
> 

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the observation.

Once a preference is established, ELRepo can certainly make the 
necessary packaging changes to ensure the desired outcome rather than 
you having to rely on repo priorities or excludes locally.

So the question is which version is preferable, and why?

I did find this discussion which suggests that bpftool is aligned to 
libbpf, now at version 1.0.0 in RHEL9.2:

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/CAEf4BzaiUbAT4hBKTVYadGdygccA3c6jgPsu8VW9sLo+4Ofsvw@mail.gmail.com/T/

Quoting from the above thread:

"I also agree that it would make sense to align it to libbpf, but that
would mean going backward on the numbers (current version is 5.16.0,
libbpf's is 0.7.0) and this will mess up with every script trying to
compare versions. We could maybe add a prefix to indicate that the
scheme has changed ('l_0.7.0), but similarly, it would break a good
number of tools that expect semantic versioning, I don't think this is
any better.

The other alternative I see would be to pick a different major version
number and arbitrarily declare that bpftool's version is aligned on
libbpf's, but with a difference of 6 for the version number. So we would
start at 6.7.0 and reach 7.0.0 when libbpf 1.0.0 is released. This is
not ideal, but we would keep some consistency, and we can always add the
version of libbpf used for the build to "bpftool version"'s output. How
would you feel about it? Did you have something else in mind?"

which explains why Red Hat bumped it to version 7.0.0 in RHEL9.2.

On that basis, the RHEL version should always be a match the for the 
distro libbpf and would be the preferred version? If that's the case, 
ELRepo could simply drop the bpftool package, ensuring that the distro 
provided package is always in sync with libbpf.

Anyone have a view?

Phil