[Spacewalk-list] some questions about OSAD and cleaning up spacewalk

[David Nutter]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 02:52:03PM +0100, Michiel van Es wrote:

*snip*
 
> - Our spacewalk diskspace is growing and growing (new updates arriving 
> every day through our reposync script).
> Many packages are being kept with older versions, for example the kernel.
> Is there a clean up script to clean up , let's say, package versions 
> older then 2 or 3 versions?
> Or how does anyone clean up their spacewalk packages?

We rely on being quite strict about our channel lifespans. We maintain
all channels as local yum repositories as well. In the case of
upstream (CentOS, EPEL etc) we rely on upstream to keep them clean for
us. We clean our own repositories manually. Each repository maps onto
one channel in Spacewalk.

Over the lifetime of a CentOS major release, the size of the channels
for that release will tend towards infinity. When a new release is
made we create a new set of channels for that release and repush all
content from the yum repositories. This is nowhere near as painful as
it sounds since most packages don't in fact change between releases
and pushing a package that already exists is super-quick. Then we
migrate systems to the new channel set and finally delete the old
channels, which does away with the accumulated cruft when you delete
the thousands of "Packages in No Channels" via "Manage Packages". 

The above approach works for us but we don't have multiple
distros/architectures and are not particularly disk-constrained as a
result. Instead, you may be able to write an API script that navigates
the package version tree to find and remove old versions.

Regards,

-- 
David Nutter                            Tel: +44 (0)131 650 4888 
BioSS, JCMB, King's Buildings, Mayfield Rd, EH9 3JZ. Scotland, UK
Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS) is formally part of The
Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI), a registered Scottish charity
No. SC006662