Bug 1967781

We can relax our debranding in CentOS Stream and ship these certificates. Do we know if there's a subscription-manager release bump planned soon?

Hi Brian,

can you please list the use cases for registering a CentOS Stream 8 system with Red Hat? Since the Red Hat product certificates are removed as part of the Red Hat debranding in CentOS (e.g. [1]), having the use cases explicitly known will help to decide whether to keep them or not in CentOS as branding exception.
(I'm not arguing against this BTW, merely asking for the use cases for public recording here.)

Thanks in advance!

[1] https://git.centos.org/rpms/subscription-manager/c/3dfccf9f6f91422bcbe01e6fba2cf1b03ef69f21?branch=c8s

(In reply to Brian Stinson from comment #1)
> We can relax our debranding in CentOS Stream and ship these certificates. Do
> we know if there's a subscription-manager release bump planned soon?

We don't have a regular release cadence, see:
https://github.com/candlepin/subscription-manager/tags
In particular, the 1.28.x versions, taken from the subscription-manager-1.28 branch, are targeted currently at RHEL 8.x.

(In reply to Pino Toscano from comment #2)
> Hi Brian,
> 
> can you please list the use cases for registering a CentOS Stream 8 system
> with Red Hat? Since the Red Hat product certificates are removed as part of
> the Red Hat debranding in CentOS (e.g. [1]), having the use cases explicitly
> known will help to decide whether to keep them or not in CentOS as branding
> exception.
> (I'm not arguing against this BTW, merely asking for the use cases for
> public recording here.)
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> [1]
> https://git.centos.org/rpms/subscription-manager/c/
> 3dfccf9f6f91422bcbe01e6fba2cf1b03ef69f21?branch=c8s

Sure, it would help developers (me) test new features, and I can imagine it helping in situations where CentOS as a CI platform. My use case is being able to use my employee subscription to test building images using osbuild-composer.

Summing up a recent discussion (mostly on IRC) with Carl George:
a) currently, subscription-manager has changes to remove its "Red Hat branding", and to make it disabled by default (see below)
b) anaconda-core requires subscription-manager packages
c) subscription-manager-initial-setup-addon (part of subscription-manager) supplements initial-setup-gui, which is installed by @gnome-desktop (dnf pulls any package that supplements a package to install)
d) the CentOS comps do not install subscription-manager or any of its packages
Because of (b) (and (c), even though that is currently stripped by the branding changes), subscription-manager is installed in GUI installations, and that explains its being disabled by default.

Since we want to have subscription-manager usable in CentOS, the plan we discussed is the following:
1) patch anaconda (which has already CentOS changes) to not require on subscription-manager
2) disable altogether subscription-manager-initial-setup-addon in CentOS: this is done as there is little value to subscribe a non-RHEL system with the initial setup GUI, and it can be done manually later on anyway; Carl opened a PR for subscription-manager to do this [1] (thanks!)
3) remove any branding or changes to subscription-manager in CentOS

With the above changes, subscription-manager should not be pulled automatically anymore; once installed manually, it will be fully functional, as you expect if you install it.

[1] https://github.com/candlepin/subscription-manager/pull/2713

The c8s build of subscription-manager-1.28.19-1.el8 no longer removes the certificates.  Please test that registration works now with this package version.

(In reply to Carl George 🤠 from comment #6)
> The c8s build of subscription-manager-1.28.19-1.el8 no longer removes the
> certificates.  Please test that registration works now with this package
> version.

Looks good, thanks!