[Spacewalk-list] CentOS errata clone/publish issues

Fri Apr 20 00:18:54 UTC 2012

Dear Spacewalk-users,

I'm trying to start using errata with my Spacewalk 1.7 installation and I'm experiencing some issues which I don't fully understand. I tried both centos-errata.py written by David Nutter and errata-import.pl by Steve Meier (both with some minor modifications), the script I use doesn't seem to make any difference. I have two base channels - CentOS5.8 i386 and CentOS6.2 x86_64, each has a set of child channels (I will focus on 6.2 64bit cause I'm not using the other one at the moment):

centos-6.2-x86_64

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-centosplus

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-epel

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-extras

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-spacewalk

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-spacewalk-client

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-updates

|-centos-6.2-x86_64-vzb

We've setup some cron jobs with my colleague so we get fresh packages to child channels every night. The base channel was synced one-off and is not synced from cron. All good. We use a very similar setup in production (still on 1.5) and it works well.

Now I want to add errata. I got all the centos announce archives and I run David's script in the loop going over the files. Errata was imported nicely, I can see about 140 errata.

Now I'd like to clone the updates channel so I have  centos-6.2-x86_64-updates-production let's call it - and it only contains errata I want. There are three options do do so: with all errata, with no errata and with a selection of errata. The third option sounds the most reasonable for my setup, so I went for it. And this raised my first question:

1)       why when I clone a channel with a selection of errata and select all errata, it contains less packages than the original channel (697 instead of 729 as per 19/04/2012)? As for my understanding (which might be wrong) both channels should be identical after that.

Seeing that, I ran another test: I cloned centos-6.2-x86_64-updates with no errata, calling it centos-6.2-x86_64-no. This results with a cloned channel with only 49 packages (this is for updates repo and for 19/04/2012 also). Then I cloned all available errata into centos-6.2-x86_64-no and I went to spacecmd CLI to publish them. The number of available packages increased, but only to 54. This raises three more questions:

2)       Is it normal that there are packages in updates channel that aren't tied to any errata or is this a sign of a problem?

3)       Why cloning and publishing all errata from updates to updates-no doesn't result with the same channel content as the original channel? I'd imagine that'd be the case..

4)       What is the supported / recommended way of publishing several errata at the same time, without going into each and clicking publish? I found a way of doing that in spacecmd CLI (running errata_publish * centos-6.2-x86_64-updates-no after cloning all errata in the GUI) but I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it - I suspect that it might be misbehaving and I'd also think that it should be possible to do this from the GUI as well..

My last test was cloning centos-6.2-x86_64-updates  to centos-6.2-x86_64-updates-all with all errata - and this worked as expected - package counts were the same, which makes sense. But why doesn't it work the same way if I clone channels without errata and then clone and publish all errata to the cloned channel? I'd expect that it should result with the same channel content but it doesn't.

Where should I look for causes of this problem?

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

Jim Chrzeszczyk

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