[Spacewalk-list] Package collision questions

[Kalchik, Jeffery]

Good morning, all.

I have a long standing situation that isn't showing any signs of improvement.  In short, I have a number of situations where a particular package name exists with multiple checksums & backend .rpm files.

Some background:

I have 5 major release trees (base channel and child channels) in Spacewalk (2.4,)  CentOS6, CentOS7, Oracle Linux 5, Oracle Linux 6, and Oracle Linux 7.  The release channels have all been created through spacewalk-common-channels.  I also have some extra child channels in each tree for things like a local utilities channel and application channels.  Each release tree is cloned into development, QA, & production trees.  All client systems are registered to a dev, QA or production tree, never to a release tree/channel.

A package may exist in multiple channels in a tree, downloaded from separate repositories.  This can cause problems during a kickstart, when a package with a different checksum gets sent down to anaconda.  To make things worse, the kickstart problem does not always occur.   I also suspect that it could be an issue in spacecmd, as commands like 'package_remove PKG' don't allow me to specify which package to remove.  Yes, 'softwarechannel_removepackage PKG' helps, I do limit each channel to a single repository, there shouldn't be any collisions within a given channel.

Here's an example.  I've written a Perl script to spin through the base channels, generate the channel list for that tree, & find all packages with multiple IDs and checksum.

librepo-1.7.16-1.el7.x86_64
128863  centos7-x86_64,dev-centos7-x86_64,prod-centos7-x86_64,qa-centos7-x86_64
136116  dev-epel7-centos7-x86_64,dev-epel7-oraclelinux7-x86_64,epel7-centos7-x86_64,epel7-oraclelinux7-x86_64,prod-epel7-centos7-x86_64,prod-epel7-oraclelinux7-x86_64,qa-epel7-centos7-x86_64,qa-epel7-oraclelinux7-x86_64

Rather obviously, this output lists all channels where that particular package ID exists.  (might be a good script enhancement to limit the channels to only this particular tree.)

Package 128863 has been downloaded from the CentOS7 repository.  Package 136116 has been downloaded from the Fedora Project's Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux.  Both packages should be perfectly valid, but built by 2 different organizations and due to different build environments, have different checksums.

Is this an issue for anyone else?  How have you addressed this?

Jeff Kalchik
Systems Engineering
Land O'Lakes


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