nbdkit is our super-flexible, pluggable NBD server. Read more about
it here:
https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkithttps://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=nbdkit
This package is in EPEL, and was added to RHEL 7.6.
Now unfortunately (owing to my screw up) we added a lower NVR to RHEL
7.6 than is present in EPEL. If we remove nbdkit from EPEL then there
wouldn't be an upgrade path to RHEL 7.6. This in itself wouldn't
matter since the version numbers are similar except for a second screw
up (yes, it's me again). The RHEL 7.6 package backports a substantial
feature from upstream. The EPEL package had a higher NVR and fewer
features. Lack of the new feature will break virt-v2v and the ability
to read virtual machines from VMware.
To get around that as the last release in EPEL I backported all the
changes from RHEL 7.6:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2018-093ee2a8e8https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/nbdkit/c/c59e48e5bb7b8867b4c180bf86d5243…
This EPEL package still has a higher NVR than RHEL 7.6, but this time
it truly doesn't matter because the packages are "effectively" the
same. If you're going from (eg) CentOS 7.5 + EPEL -> 7.6, you won't
get the nbdkit package from CentOS 7.6 (because lower NVR) but you
will still have all the features, provided you got the final EPEL
nbdkit package.
I hope that rather long explanation is clear!
I think there are two things that need to happen as a result:
(1) We need to make sure nbdkit-1.2.7-2.el7 from EPEL 7 goes out to
all the mirrors, and then wait a little while for everyone to
upgrade to it.
(2) We need to remove nbdkit from EPEL once it has appeared in CentOS
and some time has passed for (1) to happen, as per normal
procedures when a package is moved from EPEL to RHEL.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_remove_a_package_at_end_of_life#EPEL
All of this will be resolved in RHEL 7.7 by an nbdkit package with a
higher NVR than all previous.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org