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

Mon Jan 25 19:55:26 UTC 2010
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Hi,

On 21/01/10 14:02, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
>> 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
> They are compatible. I.e you can use both to Spacewalk and it will work.

ok, that basically means that most people dont *need* to use the
spacewalk client, and can stick with whats in the EL codebase for most
of their work. ( ~ my understanding )

> How can these packages make life "harder or obscure" for people who dont 
> use spacewalk? Especially if these packages will not talk to 
> rhn.redhat.com by default.

A very large number of pople who use centos, do so with little or no
previous understand of linux or even the basics of systems management -
we need to keep those people in mind as well. The problem that we have
had, in the past, is that installing yum-rhn-plugin brought in loads of
rhn\* packages as well, which in turn would cause traffic to rhn.r.c.
Also, given that rhn itself is a rhel connected service, the view we
took was that there is no need for that functionality in the distro at all.

Traditionally, the approach has been to remove all rhn references and
packages ( as much as can be done without maiming any significant
functionality ). This is how it worked for CentOS-3/4/5. Having said
that, there is no reason why we cant change things if there is a real
benefit in doing so.

Let me import the sources into a shared setup, and we can workout a
patchset that is needed. We can then target this for 5.5 inclusion if
its considered worth doing and does not cause any issues.

-- 
Karanbir Singh
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