I have system sets that I work with in which I wanted be able compare which packages and versions are installed on all of them at once, in order that I might build a profile to be used for future deployments. To do this, I was thinking that a table like that used to compare two systems might be made available, but instead list all packages that exist on at least one but not all of the systems in a group, along with which versions are installed per system. Then, a UI to select the preferred package state from the possible options of the set and apply it to all the other systems or use the result as a package profile would be great extensions to the idea.
Could you please elaborate on the presentation of the results? If you compare system group that has 500 systems and not two systems have the same set of packages, do you want to have table with 500 columns?
I think that perhaps it could be a table with rows per package like this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Package Name | Version 1 | Version 2 | Version 3 | |--------------|------------------|------------------|------------------| | kernel | 2.6.32-xxx.x.x | 2.6.32-yyy.y.y | Not Installed | | | (32 systems) | (125 systems) | (1 system) | | | (o) sync to this | ( ) sync to this | ( ) sync to this | |--------------|------------------|------------------|------------------| . . . ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would only list packages which differ on any systems, allowing the user to select which version of a package to bring all the systems in line to the selected version. The (32 systems) could be a link to a the list of systems which have that package version. I am not going to claim to be any kind of expert at UI design. There are probably better implementations!
Sorry, and to answer your comment, it seems obviously there would need to be some kind of upper limit to the version comparison for situations where you select too many different versions of a package are present in the comparision, though I'm not sure what the best choice would be, except maybe to provide a "Leave this Alone" option and list only the X most common versions of the package.
Spacewalk project as an upstream for Red Hat Satellite 5 product is going to be End Of Life on May 31 2020. Spacewalk 2.10 has been released as the last release of this project. https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki/ReleaseNotes210 Any new feature will not be included therefore closing remaining RFEs to set expectations properly.