On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Marcus Moeller wrote:
This conversation has gone past 2 full loops now. The only issue, as far as I can tell, not cleared up is that can packages in the stock EL4 and EL5 srpm tree be used against spacewalk 0.6 and 0.7 ?
They might be 'outdated' in that perhaps all features may not be present, but is there an issue of these packages not being usable at all due to an api incompatibility ?
Not now, but maybe in upcoming releases of Spacewalk.
Spacewalk is meant to be used with the Spacewalk client tools, not the RHE ones.
Marcus,
Could we please wait to hear this confirmed by someone from the Spacewalk development community ? You may or may not know that what Red Hat ships and is called Red Hat Network Satellite, is in fact using spacewalk packages, and a seperate RHN package that rebrands Spacewalk.
So I would seriously doubt that Red Hat would break compatibility with Spacewalk in their own product. What's more, even if up2date/yum-rhn would break in a future product release, it would still allow people to choose whether to use a compatible Spacewalk release or not.
In my opinion, if CentOS wants to be compatible with RHEL, it needs to be compatible even in the parts that may or may not be useful to its users. Let the users decide whether it is useful to them or not, even if the majority will never use Spacewalk.