On a large Beaker installation that has been running for many years there is likely to be a lot of rubbish OS major names that do not really exist. As soon as an OS major has been created (even if the tree is later removed, or fixed to have a different OS major name) beaker-repo-update will try to fetch harness packages for it forevermore. The result is that running beaker-repo-update will produce a large number of WARNINGs like this:

2015-04-20 05:18:46,644 bkr.server.tools.repo_update WARNING Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: http:--download.lab.bos.redhat.com-beakerrepos-harness-help-. Please verify its path and try again

which make it very difficult to notice if there is an *actual* error (for example, when the upstream repos are missing a package that is supposed to be there).

The best option is probably to skip fetching packages for OS majors which have no existing trees. We could also consider turning these errors back into errors (rather than warnings) with a non-zero exit status.