So.. I just discovered I had a mail misconfiguration which meant at least one recent message I sent to the list on the govmm stuff didn't get through. Which probably explains why I had a different idea of what was going on that other people seem to have had.
I proposed the integration of govmm into the Kata repository for two reasons:
1) To avoid the back and forth of synchronized govmm & Kata changes 2) To avoid maintaining another external interface
When I first pitched it to Fabiano I had the impression that Kata was the only user of govmm making it an internal interface in practice, so (1) was the main motivation. Having discovered that's not the case, though, (2) is really the more important factor. The Kata team really doesn't have the resources to maintain a general VMM interface - which is in fact an extremely difficult problem (witness the complexity of libvirt). It's made more difficult by the fact that there's not really a natural API boundary in between qemu itself and Kata's hypervisor interface, so what is and isn't in govmm is already pretty arbitrary and based on Kata's needs.
AIUI, at the last AC meeting, the decision was made to move govmm into the kata-containers repo, encouraging external users to consume it from the new location. That addresses (1), but not (2), since it's still effectively an external interface. It makes the dilineation of that interface even less clear than it already is.
So, I really think this is a bad approach. Instead, what I believe we should do is leave the govmm repository as is, but orphaned, for external users. They can take up maintenance of it, if they have the interest. For Kata, I think we should simply fork the current govmm state, removing any parts we don't need, and in future make no attempt to keep it as anything but an internal interface tailored for Kata's needs. I believe this will let us make some significant simplifications.
My issue and pull request (#2393 and #2395) were made with the latter approach in mind, and I'm presently holding off on merging until we're clear on how we're proceding here.