Plugins » Katello

Note: This issue strikes me as both a pulp_rpm issue as well as a "how Katello, SLES, and pulp_rpm interact" issue.

It looks like various SLES enterprise repos contain duplicate NEVRAs in the metadata which is obviously on SLES, but appears to work well enough for them. (Strictly speaking I believe it is undefined behaviour how packaging tools like yum or zypper handle such cases, I presume they just use the first duplicate NEVRA package they get to).

Example affected repo: `SLES12-SP3-Updates for sle-12-x86_64 in product SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 x86_64 (id: 1421)` (obtained via SCC manager plugin)

If one tries to sync such a repository to Katello using the "mirror_complete" mode, one gets the following sync error:

Parsing interrupted: The repository metadata being synced into Pulp is erroneous in a way that makes it ambiguous (duplicate NEVRAs), and therefore we do not allow it to be synced in 'mirror_complete' mode. Please choose a sync policy which does not mirror repository metadata.

Please read https://github.com/pulp/pulp_rpm/issues/2402 for more details.

see e.g. https://orcharhino.testdmz.atix/foreman_tasks/tasks/3ee0fe21-e380-48cc-8d97-41afb55e0016

At this point I can change the sync mode to "content_only" and sync the repo to Katello successfully.

However, if I then try to sync this repo to smart proxy, the smart proxy always uses "mirror_complete" mode and runs into the same error as before. As a user there is no way to tell the smart proxy sync to use anything other than "mirror_complete", so I am now stuck with a broken smart proxy sync.

Note that I found this issue on Katello 4.1, but given the pulp_rpm error has not changed in latest pulp_rpm, I believe this still affects the most recent Katello versions.

Internally we have "solved" this issue by patching pulp_rpm to downgrade the ERROR to a WARNING (though we have not yet done enough testing to be sure this does not cause issues when installing duplicate NEVRA packages on attached hosts)...

I have a few thoughts/questions aimed at Pulp RPM:

• Why are duplicate NEVRAs considered a bigger issue for "mirror_complete" mode, than for other sync policies? Shouldn't the opposite be true? If I am simply mirroring the upstream metadata, then I am passing through the issue from the upstream repo without taking responsibility for it. What the user gets should be as good or bad as the upstream repo itself, and if that worked for her, what Pulp serves should work just as well (or badly), no?
• If pulp lets us sync duplicate NEVRA repos using "content_only" mode, but what pulp then publishes still includes duplicate NEVRAs, and cannot be synced "mirror_complete" from Pulp to Pulp, then what have we gained by switching from "mirror_complete" to "content_only"?

I may be missing something (due to lack of in depth RPM repo knowledge), but the current handling of https://github.com/pulp/pulp_rpm/issues/2402 does not make any intuitive sense to me.