Re: libnfnetlink and libmnl

[Adolf Belka <adolf.belka@ipfire.org>]

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Hi Michael,

On 06/04/2022 16:42, Michael Tremer wrote:
> Hello Adolf,
> 
>> On 6 Apr 2022, at 14:18, Adolf Belka <adolf.belka(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> We have both libnfnetlink and libmnl in IPFire. I have just done an update of libmnl.
>> There is an update of libnfnetlink but it also says that libnfnetlink is still deprecated and should preferably be replaced by libmnl
> 
> Oh this is very interesting.
> 
> It looks like libmnl was introduced for conntrack-tools in this commit:
> 
> commit a10733a5d8580b6ab8cff46235daab6547723781
> Author: Arne Fitzenreiter <Arne_F(a)ipfire.org>
> Date:   Thu Jan 3 14:27:11 2013 +0100
> 
>      conntrack-tools: add conntrack and needed deps.
> 
> You can try to comment out libnfnetlink and libmnl and run a clean build and see if it goes through. If so, then we can safely drop them.
> 
>> I have run ./make.sh find-dependencies on both libmnl.so.0.2.0 and libnfnetlink.so.0.2.0 and neither came up with anything. Doing a grep on the git repository for mnl or nfnetlink also didn't indicate anything using these.
>> How are they being used and what needs to be done to change the usage of libnfnetlink to libmnl?
> 
> See above.
> 
> I believe there are a couple of other candidates for this which we should have a look at. There is libdnet that I noticed a little while ago, but I am sure there will be plenty more when looking through the package list:
> 
> libaio
> libart
> libnet
> libnl (and if something depends on it, can it not use libnl-3?)
> libpri (if I remember correctly this was a dependency of asterisk)
> libsolv can absolutely go for the moment, we don’t need it
> netpbm?
> pigz (we don’t use it anywhere since we are compressing images with XZ b302b9a695e391477eab0cb2343f3ba1b1ba1989)
> sdparm
> 
> If you have the time, maybe you can have a look at what is used somewhere and what can be dropped?
I will give that a go and use your inputs as starting points.

Regards,
Adolf
> 
> This won’t shrink the distribution by a massive amount, but why should we carry around dead code?
> 
> Best,
> -Michael
> 
>> Regards,
>> Adolf
>