[Spacewalk-list] About the dropping of legacy entitlment code

[Silvio Moioli]

Dear Spacewalk community,

as developers of Spacewalk's big codebase we often need to invest some time in keeping it clean and tidy, in order to be able to maintain it and extend it further.

In many cases we can do this without users even noticing, just tweaking knobs under the hood - in other cases this has an important impact on features, such as Spacewalk 2.3's dropping of the monitoring feature.

Together with other guys from SUSE I am currently involved in another such cleanup - the dropping of entitlement counting functionalities from the Spacewalk codebase.

Idea here is that entitlement counting is a feature inherited from the original closed source project to enforce constraints over licensed software usage - which is not so useful in Spacewalk being among other things a free-as-in-beer project. Moreover this feature is deeply linked in Spacewalk's code and sometimes creates headaches - for example when Spacewalk certificates expire[1] or because their code contributes to obscure deadlock bugs[2].

This was already discussed with the Core Developer Team some time ago[3] and approved in principle, so today I am sharing this with the wider user community. Thanks to help from the Core Team we have preview packages for this feature on top of nightly packages in case someone wants to try it out and give feedback.

Current status follows:

  - channel entitlement counting code has been removed completely already and packages are ready for testing (see below);
  - we removed the remaining part of the monitoring entitlements which existed before Spacewalk 2.3. Packages below will soon be updated to contain this part as well;
  - we are making good progress in dropping the Provisioning entitlement completely - a system that has the Management/Enterprise entitlement will automatically get all features previously available in Provisioning as well. We plan to push this out in some days from now;
  - we still have some work to do before we join the Virtualization and Virtualization Platform entitlements into one;
  - after that we plan to remove all system entitlement counting.

You can test this by following the usual guide for nightly Spacewalk[4] and replacing nightly repo URLs with the following ones:

​http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/devel/ (server side)
http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/devel-client/ (client side)


Developers can see and comment progress code-wise in the following pull request on GitHub:

https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/pull/280

We would love to hear any feedback from you, either here or via IRC (I am moio in freenet #spacewalk and #spacewalk-devel), and of course we are willing to help if you spot bugs!

Thanks!

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/spacewalk-devel/2015-July/msg00000.html
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1063821
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/spacewalk-devel/2015-May/msg00002.html
[4] https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToInstall
-- 
Silvio Moioli
SUSE LLC
Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg Germany