[CentOS-devel] Why are Spacewalk packages removed from CentOS?

Thu Jan 21 09:32:44 UTC 2010
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Hi James,

Dont top post, its silly. And now there is no way to co-relate what you
said to what Miroslav has.

On 21/01/10 09:16, James Hogarth wrote:
>     Yes, they carry the heritage of rhn in their name and their original
>     purpose was to connect to rhn.redhat.com <http://rhn.redhat.com>
>     (and RHN Satellite), but since
>     open sourcing this product as Spacewalk project at 2008, these tools can
>     be used to connect to Spacewalk.

I dont think the ability of these packages to connect with spacewalk is
on the conversation block here really. Its the fact that we dont want to
enable a set of tools that is in turn going to hit rhn or potentially
cause AUP issues for people who dont know what they are doing or are
unaware of the tools doing this sort of a thing.

>     Large part (if not majority) of Spacewalk users use CentOS and I'm
>     pretty sure they will appreciate, if these tools will be present
>     directly in CentoOS.

Just for the sake of having another options - would it be possible to
perhaps get a few people together to manage and run a centos-spacewalk
repo, we find project hosting and repo hosting within the centos infra
and perhaps do something to make it easily visible ( perhaps a
centos-spacewalk-release rpm which contains a .repo file pointing to
this repository ).

Secondly, what is the release timeline for these client tools into RHEL
4/5 compared with whats in the spacewalk client tools repo at the moment
? are they mostly in sync ? I could go and just look, but I expect you
guys to have a better idea on the state of things.

>     I disagree. Majority of people will install only these packages.

Ok, that clears up one part of the things for me.

>     Yes -
>     we have client repo which contains several other tools. But with these
>     packages you can do most of the management (install/upgrade/remove
>     package, do rollback, compare profiles, run scripts, reboot machines,
>     reprovision them...).
>     In fact even as developer of Spacewalk I rarely use other then those
>     mentioned client packages.
> 

Justin Sherrill had started working down the road of making a 'snapshot'
of the spacewalk client tools repo, updating that to sync with the
release schedules of CentOS-4.X and 5.X; Is that still an option ?

I dont deny the fact that adding these packages in would make things
easier for people who use spacewalk, but lets not do that if it makes
things a bit harder or obscure for people who dont use spacewalk. So
lets talk about it and see how we can make and keep both sides happy.

-- 
Karanbir Singh
kbsingh at karan.org | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
ICQ: 2522219      | Yahoo IM: z00dax      | Gtalk: z00dax
GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc