[Spacewalk-list] Need for a lightweight mirroring solution

[Michael DeHaan]

Many questions I get on cobbler's mailing list deal with using 
yum_rhn_plugin to mirror RHEL packages.   These are typically from users 
who have small-mid size environments that cannot use Satellite for 
various reasons.

The problem with this is that Spacewalk/Satellite's yum_rhn_plugin can 
only be used to mirror packages that match the arch (and distro) of the 
requestor.  There is not a good solution for older RHEL or other arches.

Folks who get fed up with this generally turn to mrepo's rhnget, which 
is a less than elegant solution for several reasons --more so, it does 
not properly track entitlements, so it's a bit hard to audit what 
systems are using what.   It's basically a script that uses part of the 
up2date code.
 
Now that Spacewalk is out, anyone care to use this list/thread to 
jumpstart (err, kickstart?) some discussions about getting 
https://fedorahosted.org/pulp moving again?   I am not so much 
interested in the whole TurboGears UI idea, primarily I just want to see 
command line tools and an API to faciliate easier mirroring.  If done as 
a side-project, it could also be done in such a way as to not require 
Oracle.

Since cobbler already contains constructs for repo mirroring via yum, 
and we are integrating this into Satellite, perhaps this is something 
that can be done under cobbler's umbrella to save a bit of 
infrastructure.    (There is already a completed web app, mirroring 
code, an XMLPPC interface, and so forth).   Still, I have zero idea how 
the entitlements connection would work.

Comments?   Discussion?  Fire away.

--Michael