[Spacewalk-list] Updating python2.7 packages on Ubuntu 16.04 causes removal of spacewalk client packages and multiple python 2.7 packages

[Paul-Andre Panon]

>
>Am 17. April 2018 19:27:17 MESZ schrieb Paul-Andre Panon <paul-andre.panon at avigilon.com>:
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>On Monday, April 16, 2018 10:17 PM, Robert Paschedag 
>>[mailto:robert.paschedag at web.de] wrote:
>>>Am 17. April 2018 01:27:11 MESZ schrieb Paul-Andre Panon
>><paul-andre.panon at avigilon.com>:
>>>>Hi,
>>>>
>>>>When trying to apply python 2.7 package updates on our Ubuntu 16.04 
>>>>systems, Spacewalk tries to commit suicide by removing all the 
>>>>Spacewalk packages and multiple python packages (as well as sssd if 
>>>>it's in use). To fix the problem we need to back up the Spacewalk 
>>>>sources.list and Spacewalk repo files, switch back to Ubuntu repos by
>>
>>>>swapping to pre-Spacewalk sources.list, re-install python2.7 and the 
>>>>Spacewalk client, and the switch to the Spacewalk sources.list and
>>repo
>>>>file again.
>
>Hmmm.. does this happen everytime on those clients?
>
>I'm thinking about the headers of the packages already "installed" on the clients (where this error occurs)
>
>Please check the headers in.... (where is that stored again??) /var/lib/dpkg/state?
>
>Robert
>
Yes, every time. I can't find it anymore, but I thought I had received an e-mail from someone at RedHat about this. If I remember correctly, they had indicated that Spacewalk couldn't find info on the packages being removed and that I needed to add them.

Now, when I tried to set up GPG signing for Ubuntu 16.04 clients, I ran into some issues when having merged the universe and main package repos into a single channel. When checking the signature, apt-get just wasn't happy about the combined repos. So I had deleted the top channel and recreated it with just the main repo, and without creating a new universe child channel. I was hoping that, since the packages were already installed, I could get away with leaving universe active in sources.list. So it was a possible that assumption was the problem. 

This week I had a chance to upgrade SW to 2.8, and to create a new child channel for the universe repo. Just retested after all those changes and I still have the same problems of applying updates resulting in the loss of sssd + spacewalk client on Ubuntu 16.04 when applying updates.  So that doesn't appear to have been the problem after all, or maybe SW can only deal with it if the package is in the top/parent Channel, and that appears to be incompatible with Ubuntu GPG/secure-apt support.

Paul-Andre Panon
Senior Systems Administrator