[Spacewalk-list] I'm about to write a script for resolving issues with duplicate packages with different checksums under the same base channel and would like peoples wish list for it

[Paul Robert Marino]

hello every one

I'm planning to write a little cleanup script to detect duplicate
packages with different checksums in the same base channel and or its
children and clean them up.
this often happens in cases where a package gets moved from EPEL to
the core distro or can occasionally happen when third party repos
conflict with each other,

I ran to these issue recently between RDO Grizzly and Scientific Linux
6.4 and its not the first time I also had a nightmare with this in the
months following the release of RHEL 6.4. I doubt I'm the only one who
ran into this and suspect there are many people who have kickstart
profiles which are vulnerable to it and don't know it yet.


Here is what I'm thinking so far and If any one else has any
additional ideas please let me know.

1) A simple reporting mode where the conflicts are just enumerated so
an administrator can take action on them.

2) The user should be able to set the a priority for the channels to
decide which one would supersede the other in the case of a conflict.
Then it should delete the one in the lower priority channel and
optionally be duplicate able to copy the one from the higher priority
channel to take the place of the one that was just deleted.

3) The ability to over ride the channel priority based on fields in
the metadata. For example if the vendor name matches a specific vendor
it always is the one that's kept and any others are deleted regardless
of the channel priority

4) possibly an optimized version which can just focus on one or more
channels known to potential to create these kinds of conflicts.