Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1478589
[RFE] [6.3] Note About Virt-Who Must Come From Red Hat Satellite Tools Repository.
Last modified: 2017-08-14 10:36:19 EDT
Document URL: <https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_satellite/6.2/html/virtual_instances_guide/prerequisites#installing_virt-who> Section Number and Name: 4.5. Installing virt-who Describe the issue: The guide contains the following note: The virt-who package must be obtained from the Red Hat Satellite Tools repository as this provides the latest version. This caused a customer confusion, as despite having both the rhel-7-server-rpms and rhel-7-server-satellite-tools-6.2-rpms repositories enabled, yum only showed the virt-who package from the rhel-7-server-rpms repository. Example: # yum info virt-who | grep -E ^Name\|^Version\|^Release\|^Repo Name : virt-who Version : 0.19 Release : 2.el7sat Repo : rhel-7-server-rpms/7Server/x86_64 Once the customer was informed that when 2 repositories contain the same package at the same version & release level, yum (apparently) will use the 1st repository it found it in. Yum will not mention the 2nd repository. Disabling the rhel-7-server-rpms proves this to be true: # yum --disablerepo rhel-7-server-rpms info virt-who | grep -E ^Name\|^Version\|^Release\|^Repo Name : virt-who Version : 0.19 Release : 2.el7sat Repo : rhel-7-server-satellite-tools-6.2-rpms/x86_64 Suggestions for improvement: Maybe change the note to read: To ensure one installs the latest virt-who package, enable the Red Hat Satellite Tools repository. If both it and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux repository contain the latest package, yum may pull it from either.
It is NOT universally true that the version of virt-who provided in the Satellite tools channel is the newest. Which version of virt-who the users gets is dependent on - the RHEL release cadence. - whether or not a newer version is _required_ to be shipped in the Satellite tools repo. As a general rule, the only time a new version of virt-who is shipped in the Satellite tools repo is when there are a number of fixes or enhancements that Satellite requires that are needed in a quicket cadence than the RHEL release cycle (every 6-8 months). As this scenarios cannot be known in advance, the only sane course of action to tell the end user is - on the system that runs virt-who, enable the Satellite Tools repo. - let yum pick _whichever_ package is the latest.
Assigning to Misha for review. Misha - looks like we need to update the note in question to say that the virt-who package is available from either channel, and that the latest version, whichever repo it comes from, is the one that we should install.
Hello, These changes are now live on the customer portal.