[Spacewalk-list] Missing group (comps.xml) information with Fedora 22

[Jan Dobes]

On 11.1.2016 21:53 Brian Buesker wrote:
> I recently upgraded our spacewalk server to version 2.4 since that
> version officially supports Fedora 22. I had previously created a Fedora
> 22 distribution (when my spacewalk server was still running 2.3) and
> created a channel that I synced with the Fedora 22 Everything
> repository. This sync indicated it was able to fetch the comps file.
>
>     Linking packages to channel.
>     Repo
>     http://mirror.pnl.gov/fedora/linux/releases/22/Everything/x86_64/os/
>     has comps file
>     1b6e2afe599e5969f9c6e50bad1bf85e2ab23929500e08a4d006330da602fdc4-comps-f22.xml.xz.
>     Repo
>     http://mirror.pnl.gov/fedora/linux/releases/22/Everything/x86_64/os/
>     has 0 errata.
>     Sync completed.
>     Total time: 1 day, 11:32:17
>
> I also confirmed that this the comps file is present on the file system
> as well as in the database.
>
> When I went to install a machine, I found that both during kickstart and
> during normal operation that the group information (provided by
> comps.xml) does not seem to be available. During kickstart, I saw the
> xz-compressed comps.xml file in the dnf cache directory (but not the
> uncompressed one), but still received an error for each package group my
> kickstart file specified.
>
> After kickstart, I found that neither the compressed nor uncompressed
> files were present in the dnf cache directory. All dnf groupinstall
> operations fail with no such group and a dnf grouplist indicates there
> is no group data available in the repositories.
>
> After poking around in the dnf and librepo code, I think I may have a
> clue as to why this is happening. The dnf python code is constructing a
> librepo Handle that sets the file whitelist to only include the
> compressed form of the groups ("groups_gz"). See how yumdlist gets
> initialized in the repo module within dnf. Since it appears the
> repomd.xml provided by Spacewalk only includes the uncompressed groups
> file, librepo never ends up downloading the groups file and thus it is
> not available for dnf operations.
>
> At this point I think I'll be able to work around this by a combination
> of a pre-nochroot script that updates this variable to include "group"
> and then a patched dnf RPM that fixes this. With that said, are there
> any plans in a future Spacewalk version to fix it so that it includes
> both the group and group_gz types?
>
> Thanks,
> Brian
>

Hello,

thank you for investigating that. It makes sense to me to fix it.

Regards,
-- 
Jan Dobes
Satellite Engineering, Red Hat