On Thu, 5 Nov 2020 12:19:00 -0800, Andrii Nakryiko wrote:

I'll just quote myself here for your convenience.

Sorry, I missed your original email for some reason.

  Submodule is a way that I know of to make this better for end users.
  If there are other ways to pull this off with shared library use, I'm
  all for it, it will save the security angle that distros are arguing
  for. E.g., if distributions will always have the latest libbpf
  available almost as soon as it's cut upstream *and* new iproute2
  versions enforce the latest libbpf when they are packaged/released,
  then this might work equivalently for end users. If Linux distros
  would be willing to do this faithfully and promptly, I have no
  objections whatsoever. Because all that matters is BPF end user
  experience, as Daniel explained above.

That's basically what we already do, for both Fedora and RHEL.

Of course, it follows the distro release cycle, i.e. no version
upgrades - or very limited ones - during lifetime of a particular
release. But that would not be different if libbpf was bundled in
individual projects.

 Jiri