[Spacewalk-list] maybe request: how to use yum groups with spacewalk

[Cliff]

John Hodrien wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Nov 2009, Marco Giunta wrote:
> 
>> Hi at all,
>> I 'd like to know if someone is able to use the yum groups with
>> spacewalk; I've found only 1 message, in this mailing list, about a guy
>> complaining the lack of these features. I 've other servers with RHEL
>> and a Satellite, and there, I can use yum groups.
>> Who know if this features is available with spacewalk 0.6 ? If it's
>> available, how to manage and use it ??
> 
> My understanding was that there's currently no group support.  It used 
> to be
> easy enough to lever it into the kickstart side, but not the rest.
> 
> Dummy packages that pull in the members is another way of doing it.
> 
> jh
> 
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> 

Hi there,
The issue is that custom channels, which are used in Spacewalk have no 
group logic. A recent Satellite customer provided me a solution that 
they used in their Satellite to achieve the same results, of yum group 
commands for custom channels.

(This is on my looong todo list and I would rather share this 
information for others to act on rather than wait for me!)

I have not tested this nor converted it into a usable 
document/instructions for Spacewalk , which does not have Red Hat 
content, but can create kickstart trees etc. If you wish to, please do 
try this and/or hack it and get it to work. I ask if you do to then 
create a wiki page on spacewalk wiki for this for others to use going 
forward.

Thanks,
Cliff

---

* leveraging RHN's kickstart directory, I ran the following SQL to link 
to their comps.xml

SQL>
insert into rhnchannelcomps
(id, channel_id, relative_filename)
values (124, 124, 
'rhn/kickstart/ks-rhel-i386-server-5-u2/Server/repodata/comps-rhel5-server-core.xml');


NOTES:

     * The ID of 124 /just worked/.  I don't know why, or the long-term
       consequence of inserting such.
       I first tried the SQL insert without an ID. Apparently it doesn't
       have a counter. (Which is different from /knowing /they won't slip
       one in sometime in the future.)
     * This is the only record in rhnchannelcomps. Looking at cache, I'd
       guess the comps.xml for the Red Hat base channel is derived from
       the xml-kickstartable-tree subdirectory (which has the necessary
       info for the Red Hat base channel).
       I DO NOT KNOW if the ONLY REASON I had /success /is because I used
       the comps.xml from a properly configured kickstart.
     * *If* linking to any-old comps.xml file will work, that file must
       be somewhere under the rhn/ directory. This directory tree has
       been maintained by satellite-sync. It seems reasonable that we
       could make our own kickstart trees. I am not sure it is reasonable
       to just litter a few comps.xml files into a subdirectory and
       insert rhnchannelcomps records into the database.


*Final state:*
yum grouplist works as /hoped /(returns a list of groups)