[ovs-dev] [PATCH ovn] ovs: Bump submodule version to latest ovsdb-cs changes.

[Han Zhou]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 6:11 PM Ben Pfaff <blp at ovn.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 08:07:58PM -0500, Mark Michelson wrote:
> > On 3/11/21 5:58 PM, Ilya Maximets wrote:
> > > I'd say that eventually OVN should become less feature hungry
> > > or less dependent from OVS changes.  Then we should consider
> > > to use only stable released OVS as a build dependency and
> > > actually wait for the next major OVS release if some new features
> > > required from it.  But right now we can't afford that.
> >
> > I'd say the vast majority of the time these days, the OVS changes OVN
> > depends on are specifically OVSDB changes. One possible idea is to
separate
> > OVSDB from OVS and semantically version the OVSDB API. Then OVS and OVN
> > would be consumers of the same common project.
> >
> > You'd still have the potential for needing to update the OVS submodule
to
> > some non-released version. But hopefully the frequency of such updates
would
> > be reduced. And if the frequency is reduced enough, it probably
wouldn't be
> > outside the realm of reason to request backports of bug fixes and
> > point-releases of OVS whenever OVN requires a submodule update.
>
> I'm adding Dmitry Yusupov to this thread because he expressed some
> interest in separating OVSDB from OVS in the latest OVS Orbit episode
> (https://ovsorbit.org/#e72).

I think this is not only a dependency problem of compiling, but also of
runtime, if we want to continue supporting debian, because in debian
packages dynamic linked library is used instead of statically linked. If I
understand correctly, the submodule approach solves the compile time
dependency but not runtime, for debian. So the only way out eventually
might be separating OVSDB from OVS. (Please correct me if I am wrong)