pkgSkipList=kernel*; is going to ignore all kernel-blah.blah pkgs, which is what you want, but will also ignore all kernelcfg pkgs, which is probably not what you want. kernel-* might look like a way out, but that ignored kernel-pcmcia-cs and kernel-utils, but not kernel-VERSION itself. Right now, there doesn't appear to be a way to ignore the kernel without also ignoring every possible package that starts with "kernel". Maybe not to bad today, until you errata kernelcfg.
you can use something like: pkgSkipList=kernel,kernel-pcmcia,kernel-smp, But your right, this needs to be modified in the default configufation. Luckily I dont think we'll be doing a kernelcfg errta anytime soon except maybe `rpm -e kernelcfg` ;->
chances of us errata'ing kernelcfg are NIL.
What are the chances of you errating any package with the same kind of name conflict as a pkg glob that a user has set in up2date? kernelcfg was just one example. "We won't errata kernelcfg" does NOT fix this bug. Sorry. I don't have a complete 7.0 on my box - are there no other name clashes involving: gnome- kde* etc etc? Are there going to be any new pkgs that have name conflicts like that? kde* when the kde team decides to make a base "kde" pkg would trigger this nicely.
The reason that kernel* is on the list is becuase we don't have a really good way of dealing with the kernel errata at this point. User intervention is still necessary to get lilo.conf setup and run, so we threw it on the list. If users choose to put something like "kde*" on their excludes list, then so be it. Red Hat will not ship a default config with that.