[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk server keeps resyncing same packages from channel

[Michael Mraka]

Wenkai Chen:
> HI Spacewalk users,
> 
> I have a Spacewalk server configure with several channels (CentOS and RHEL).
> When I tried to do a spacewalk-repo-sync, I discovered that it keeps syncing the same packages over and over again. These same packages are already resynced during the last repo sync. However, it gets synced again.
> 
> For instance, my command below runs a spacewalk-repo-sync on a channel twice. In those 2 runs, the same packages are being downloaded and imported. Its seems to me that these packages never got written to database. Anyone can help advise if this is correct or incorrect behaviour?
> Thank you .
> 
> [root at ensco2swkdev01 rhn]# spacewalk-repo-sync -c centos7
> 16:40:33 ======================================
> 16:40:33 | Channel: centos7
> 16:40:33 ======================================
> 16:40:33 Sync of channel started.
> 16:40:33
> 16:40:33   Processing repository with URL: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/updates/x86_64/
> 16:41:46     Packages in repo:              2236
> 16:41:50     Packages already synced:       2228
> 16:41:50     Packages to sync:                 8
> 16:41:50     New packages to download:         8
> 16:41:50   Downloading packages:
> 16:41:50     1/8 : pki-base-10.5.9-6.el7.noarch.rpm
...
> 16:42:01   Processing repository with URL: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/
> 16:42:11
> 16:42:11   Importing comps file comps.xml.
> 16:42:13     Packages in repo:             10019
> 16:42:34     Packages already synced:      10011
> 16:42:34     Packages to sync:                 8
> 16:42:34     New packages to download:         8
> 16:42:34   Downloading packages:
> 16:42:34     1/8 : pki-base-10.5.9-6.el7.noarch.rpm
...

Hello,

If you download the two packages
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/updates/x86_64/Packages/pki-base-10.5.9-6.el7.noarch.rpm
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/pki-base-10.5.9-6.el7.noarch.rpm
you can see they have different size and buildtime.
414392  'Fri 02 Nov 2018 20:05:20 CET' os/pki-base-10.5.9-6.el7.noarch.rpm
414396  'Tue 29 Jan 2019 18:47:13 CET' updates/pki-base-10.5.9-6.el7.noarch.rpm
So what's actually happening there is: you sync pki-base from os, then
overwrite it with version from updates; and then during the next sync
you overwrite it with os version and once more with updates version, etc.

IMHO it's Centos bug - a package from os should never be (without
version-release change) rebuilt into updates.

I'd recommend to create a separate child channel for updates and do not
mix os and updates rpms into one channel.


Regards,

--
Michael Mráka
System Management Engineering, Red Hat