[et-mgmt-tools] RFC Cobbler Purge command

[Michael DeHaan]

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> This is probably overkill, but as I am trying to install various
> 'channels' from DVD's I realized that I wanted to remove some DVD's
> later and trying to track all the data down connected to it wasn't
> something immediately known.
>
> cobbler purge <distro|profile|repo|system> --name=<?> [--force]
>
> Would be a way to 'wipe' out data from a system if it is no longer
> needed (system may be overkill) but would allow for you to something
> like
>
> cobbler purge distro --name=rhel-4.6-as-xen-i386
>
> WARNING: profile UNM-rhel4-xen-base is linked to distro rhel-4.6-as-xen-i386
> WARNING: system xxx_unm_edu is linked to UNM-rhel4-xen-base
> WARNING: system prn_unm_edu is linked to UNM-rhel4-xen-base
>
> The user could then move those to other profiles (somehow). And if a
> --force is done then they all are removed from the system removing all
> the rpm directories in /var/www/cobbler etc connected to that profile.
>
>
>   

I agree.

There are a couple of things available already for this in 0.8.X that 
get you halfway:

cobbler distro delete --name=foo will warn (but doesn't give the full 
linkage report of everything affected...it most definitely should).
cobbler distro delete --name=foo --recursive will delete child objects  
(it's a valid command on profiles also)

There's also a ticket open for a --delete-files option, which would do 
the rest.

(This would involve finding things that were obviously mirrored by 
cobbler and clearing them out.)

Support for deletion and assigning objects to other objects could be 
interesting as well, but can be done with an edit before
running the delete in that case.

If we added a command like "cobbler system whatuses --profile=X" we 
could possibly do all sorts of clever things with xargs.  That may be 
crazy though :)

--Michael