RFE: please provide possibility to build procdump against system installed libbf

[kloczek]

RFE: please provide possibility to build procdump against system installed libbf

[MarioHewardt]

We'll tag this as a future enhancement to make sure we're tracking it.

[MarioHewardt]

Hi - We statically build and link against the version of libbpf that we need during build. Is there a reason you need this to build against system installed libbpf? There is a myriad of different versions out there and we may not be able to build against them.

[kloczek]

Reason always in such cases is the same.
In case finding any new bug in exact library all what is needed is fixing and rebuilding package with that library without rebuilding anything which issues static linking.

Currently in our distro libbpf is used by

[tkloczko@pers-jacek SPECS]$ grep libbpf * -l | grep -v libbpf.spec
bcc.spec
bpftrace.spec
criu.spec
kernel-tools.spec
libabigail.spec
systemd.spec
v4l-utils.spec

So it make sense to have and use only shared libbpf.

[MarioHewardt]

How do you handle version dependencies in your distro with potentially breaking changes? For example, if ProcDump requires version X and criu requires version Y (with breaking changes between the two). I can certainly provide the option of using system installed libbpf and check version at build time. If for some reason it's not available, fall back to static linking.

[kloczek]

Using pkgconfig handless all those cases.

[kloczek]

Meson, cmake, GNU autotools provides well designed interface with pkgconfig.
IMO you should consider start use one of those build frameworks instead maintaining custom set of Makefile files .. only because it is waste of time maintaining that.