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

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 09:44, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> 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?
>

virt-devel is in the Code Ready Builder which is PowerTools in CentOS.
The upstream in Code Ready Builder had tooling issues which caused the
virt module to diverge from the virt-devel one so you could not
actually install anything from virt-devel and have a working system
until mid September (from what I can tell in EPEL repo breakouts.) I
am expecting that whatever the tooling issue is also what is causing
problems getting the two to sync up in CentOS also.

> 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.

It could be.. the virt-devel in Code Ready Builder was not matching
virt module from May until late September until they got whatever
working again..

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.