G'Day all,

I have colleagues working on BCC Python tools (e.g., the recent
enhancement of tcpconnect.py) and I'm wondering, given libbpf tools,
what our advice should be.

- Should we keep both Python and libbpf tools in sync?
- Should we focus on libbpf only, and leave Python versions for legacy systems?

I like the tweak-ability of the Python tools: sometimes I'm on a
production instance and I'll copy a tool and edit it on the fly. That
won't work with libbpf. Although, we also install all the bpftrace
tools on our prod instances [0], and if I'm editing tools I start with
them.

However, the llvm dependency of the Python tools is a pain, and an
obstacle for making bcc tools a default install with different
distros. I could imagine having a selection of the top 10 libbpf tools
as a package (bcc-essentials), which would be about 1.5 Mbytes (last
time I did libbpf tool it was 150 Kbytes stripped), and getting that
installed by default by different distros. (Ultimately, I want a
lightweight bpftrace installed by default as well.)

So, I guess I'm not certain about the future of the BCC Python tools.
What do people think? If we agree that the Python tools are legacy, we
should update the README to let everyone know.

Note: I'm just talking about the tools (tools/*.py)! I imagine BCC
Python is currently used for many other BPF things, and I'm not
suggesting that go away.

Brendan

[0] https://github.com/Netflix-Skunkworks/bpftoolkit