[Spacewalk-list] CentOS errata spanning multiple releases

[Franky Van Liedekerke]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:42:27 -0500
"Paul Robert Marino" <prmarino1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Franky
> Its a little more complicated than that look at the ticket the API
> overrides the package IDs because when you add the package via the
> API it does an other NVREA search and propagates the first package it
> finds to the rest of the channels. Even if it doesn't match the
> package id you defined in the creation of the errata. This isn't by
> accident by the way it explicitly stated in comment in the code that
> it was done that way on purpose. Its not actually the fault of the
> developers of the errata sync scripts. So don't blame it on David
> Nutter by saying he wrote a bad script.
> 
> I did a lot of digging into the subject and would be glad to share
> notes with you on the developers list. Just start the thread and I'll
> jump in.
> 
> That being said there are a few options for sync scripts.
> There Frankys script
> There is mine
> https://github.com/prmarino1/Extravehicular-Activity-Admin/blob/master/errata-tools/eva-direct-errata-sync.pl
> And many more 

Hi Paul,

I just said the script can cause cross-channel contamination and should
therefore be avoided.
I believe his script was about the first one out there, so I give him
credit for that (the first one I heard of anyway). Probably it was never
written with more than one OS using the same errata in mind.
But it is exactly the same script that caused me hours/days of extra
work since none of our centos servers would upgrade no more due to
redhat packages always appearing in the channels. Once I discovered it
was the errata script, I first fixed it by finetuning exactly those
lines I mentioned. After that, I got the other issue of errata already
being there for centos 5 and you couldn't get it to publish the
same anymore for centos 6 etc ... So I then abandonned that script, and
in the end ended up with writing a new one (based on existing scripts).

Franky