[Spacewalk-list] Moving child channels between parent channels

[David Nutter]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 11:31:01AM +0100, James Hogarth wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> With Centos 5.5 about to drop on us I'd like to create a new 5.5
> parent channel and fill it up and when tested move my current child
> channels to it.
> 
> It's possible I might have missed something but I can't see a way
> currently in the UI (or via the API) to accomplish this.
> 
> Would it be as simple as a SQL statement to the Oracle DB of
> 
> update RHNCHANNEL set PARENT_CHANNEL='<new parent channel id>' where
> label='<Child channel label>';
> 
> or does it go deeper than that?

Possibly not but the way I accomplish this is to clone the unchanged
child channels to a new child channel under the new base channel then
delete the old one. Systems can then be migrated simply by changing
their subscriptions. So for example when I do the upgrade I'll be
cloning the child channel "bioss-x86_64-custom-5.4" under
"centos-x86_64-base-5.4" to "bioss-x86_64-custom-5.5" under
"centos-x86_64-base-5.5". No need to go into Oracle.

Doing this through the UI involves quite a bit of clicking but it
should be readily automatable through the API if you have loads of
systems. 

Regarding DB usage, this doesn't seem to use up too much extra space,
presumably because all a channel consists of is a list of package IDs.

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
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