[Spacewalk-list] Errata sync fails as fields are to small

[Jan Pazdziora]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 07:00:30PM +0200, Patrick Hurrelmann wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> when trying to add the errata RHSA-2012-0743
> (https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0743.html) to my SW 1.7
> installation using centos-errata.py it fails with an internal error.
> 
> To cut a long story short, it fails as the description of this
> errata is larger than 4000 chars and the db field is limited to
> 4000. Is there any special need or technical background why this
> field is limited to 4000chars?

The technical brackground is the length limitation of the Oracle
varchar2 datatype.

> Wouldn't it make sense to use an
> dynamic sized text column instead?

Given the fact that the rhn.redhat.com's database has the same length
limit for description description, there isn't any urgent need to do
that. Presumably the centos-errata.py tool comes up with value which
is longer than the original.

-- 
Jan Pazdziora
Principal Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat