On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, Marcus Moeller wrote: > Dear Dag, > >> 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. > > I am an active member of the Spacewalk Community for quite a long time > (not seen you there btw.). At work we are using both, Satellite or > Spacewalk, so please go ahead and fool someone else. I am not fooling anyone here. I never said I was a Spacewalk developer, and I never said you were _not_ part of the Spacewalk community. I am also not taking a position into the outcome. But we had at least one Red Hat developer here going against your advice. So I'd like to hear their opinion, rather than 3 times your opinion. > Spacewalk is the UPSTREAM for Satellite, so development is quite > faster. Packages that are concerned to be used with Satellite could as > well work with Spacewalk but may lack of features (as stated before). Sure, but even if Spacewalk would move on, people are not forced to use a newer Spacewalk. And even in the case that they would need a newer client, they will have to install that one anyway. So the gain is zero in case the client would not work with the latest Spacewalk, but positive if it is used against a compatible Spacewalk or even RHN. >> 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. > > This has really nothing to do with RHEL compability, or do you want to > manage your CentOS clients with Satellite? Marcus, if we look at the wider picture and CentOS would ship the RHEL RHN code. In that case what CentOS ships might have an impact to the reasoning and decisions the Spacewalk developers are taking. Furthermore, at some point RHN will have to support CentOS clients as well (not sure if they are doing that now), but if RHN Satellite is competing with Spacewalk on functionality and Spacewalk would allow RHEL, CentOS, SciLinux and Solaris, but RHN Satellite would not, it seems only natural that Red Hat would be forced to change. Which means that even if not now, future RHEL releases might again be compatible. So leaving it out doesn't give any benefits. Now I can give you another reason why having the RHN libraries (at least) available on CentOS would be useful. mrepo used the RHN libraries for download packages from RHN. My way of supporting CentOS, was to ship a copy of those libraries with mrepo. So for me it doesn't matter anymore. But it can impact people outside of the Spacewalk community if RHEL and CentOS are different. -- -- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]