community.general.rhn_register is being used for OLM ( spacewalk fork for onsite repo server)

grendelson commented 10 months ago

Summary

The above module is marked deprecated and the doc stats that it was used in RHN 5 and "might" be used in SUSE Mgr. Oracle Linux Mgr ( fork of spacewalk ) also uses this tool and Ansible scripting allows us to add/remove/re-add Servers both on site and in oracle cloud to our own OLM ( Oracle owned spacewalk fork). Please reconsider removing it completely.

Issue Type

Feature Idea

Component Name

community.general.rhn_register

Additional Information

Code of Conduct

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ansibullbot commented 10 months ago

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plugins/modules/rhn_register.py

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ansibullbot commented 10 months ago

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felixfontein commented 10 months ago

CC @ptoscano

ptoscano commented 10 months ago

Hi @grendelson,

thanks for letting us know about OLM; I was definitely not aware of this, and it is good that the deprecation of the rhn_register and rhn_channel modules triggered this discussion.

Your feedback solves one half of the situation, i.e. "are the modules actually useful"; the other half is "are the modules maintained" is still missing though. Even if what the modules do is "stable", the modules themselves need an active maintanership for various tasks:

the current set of people marked as maintainers for the two modules has mostly Red Hat folks, which means that the interest and the possibility to verify changes to them is very small (if any)
improve their documentation:
- for example work more on the semantic markup that @felixfontein introduced with #6683 & #6744
- possibly stop mentioning "Red Hat" and "RHN", since the modules cannot deal with RH bits anymore (avoids potential confusion)
keep verifying that the modules still work with newer versions of Ansible Core
keep verifying that the modules still work with newer versions of Python
switch the rhn_register module away from the plugins.module_utils.redhat module shipped by community.general (the RegistrationBase class, in particular): that public module installed by the collection has not seen changes for years, and the rhsm modules stopped using it long ago; that redhat module is planned for removal too (see #6663)
switch the rhn_register module away from hardcoding RH bits, such as the special rhn.redhat.com value for server_url (see the Rhn class, in particular the api() and _is_hosted() methods); those code paths relying on rhn.redhat.com are practically dead code
potentially make rhn_channel able to pick the right server URL, in the same way done by rhn_register, without requiring it to be fully specified as parameter

Plus maybe something else I'm missing now.

The main point here is: if they should be kept in community.general (and thus shipped in newer versions), they must be maintained by someone.

felixfontein commented 10 months ago

I guess it would make sense to rename these modules to no longer mention rhn in their name (and update their documentation accordingly, and also stop mentioning RH), and to vendor the parts from the module_utils that are still needed into the modules (resp. delete all parts that aren't used, and rename the leftover).

cwilliam-carrix commented 8 months ago

My group is using this module for the same, Oracle Linux Manager, use case.

felixfontein commented 3 months ago

Are you also using rhn_channel, or just rhn_register?

In any case, how about renaming that module from rhn_register to spacewalk_register, since the underlying codebase is (or at least used to be) called spacewalk, and documenting that it can be used both for OLM and SuSE Manager?

Or renaming it to olm_register? Especially if we're not sure it can really be used with SuSE Manager, and also since nobody so far commented on using it for SuSE?

Or simply remove this module (in the 10.0.0 major release), and add a reduced copy as olm_register?

I'm happy to help doing the basic work, but I cannot test the result and I won't maintain it. (Keeping the code as "works now but nobody maintains it" is fine for me, there's a lot of similar code in here already... If it stops working, I hope that folks will not just create issues but also try to fix them :) )

cwilliam-carrix commented 2 months ago

My group is using this module for the same, Oracle Linux Manager, use case.

My team is moving away from Oracle Linux Manager to a different solution so we can come off the "interested in keeping this feature alive" list :)

felixfontein commented 3 weeks ago

Is anyone subscribed to this discussion still interested in keeping this module around? community.general 10.0.0 is coming up this fall.

ansible-collections / community.general