[CentOS-devel] Missing virt-devel module in CentOS 8

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 09:05:38PM -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> The virt-devel module appears to be missing from CentOS 8.  I filed
> https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=16492 but haven't had any
> response, so I figured I would try here as well.  Can anyone clue me
> in to what's up?  Thanks!

There's a virt module in RHEL 8, but I didn't know there was a
virt-devel module.  Is this something specific to CentOS?

Anyway with respect to the bug report, we added libssh2 to the virt
module RHEL 8.0, but removed it in 8.1.

The reason is to do with certification.  We (Red Hat) could only
afford to have one ssh client library go through Common Criteria
certification, and the one we chose was libssh (which is a completely
different & unrelated library from libssh2, not an earlier version).

But at the time RHEL 8.0 shipped, qemu was dependent on libssh2 so we
had to temporarily ship it in the virt module.  Then we worked on
changing qemu so it depends on libssh, added libssh to RHEL AppStream,
updated qemu, and dropped libssh2 from the virt module.

If libssh2 is missing then it's probably as a consequence of these
shenanigans, but long term it's best to use libssh and forget about
libssh2.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine.  Supports Linux and Windows.
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/