[Spacewalk-list] Repo Maintenance with spacewalk-reposync

[Michael Mraka]

Glennie, Jonathan - 0443 - MITLL wrote:
% I've been seeing interesting oddities with my spacewalk channels syncing
% over time on Spacewalk 1.3.  One issue that keeps cropping up is my
% spacewalk channels will inexplicably contain more packages than the actual
% upstream channels, even though when I run the repo sync command it reports
% that the upstream repo has the correct number of packages.  For instance,
% this morning my CentOS OS repo had 4400+ packages in it and running the
% repo-sync command reported that there were 3535 packages in the upstream
% repo.  Not sure how it happens, but I get multiple copies some of the
% packages.  I've been deleting all of the packages in my SW repo once a week
% and letting it do a complete re-sync in order to get the correct number of
% packages.  Has anyone else seen this behavior?  If so, are there any better
% ways to handle it?  I've set up my repo syncs to run nightly from a cron
% with the format "/usr/bin/spacewalk-repo-sync --channel centos5-os-x86_64
% --url http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/x86_64/ --type yum".  I would
% think that's ok, but maybe I should be running something slightly different,
% or have better luck setting up the syncs through the web UI?

This usually happens for repos like Fedora or CentOS. Once they release
new version of a package they also remove older version from the repo.
On the other hand packages in Spacewalk channel aren't removed so you
can see all released version of the package there.

Q: Why to keep all package versions?
A: To be able to do rollback to older system snapshot.

Regards,

--
Michael Mráka
Satellite Engineering, Red Hat