CentOS/EPEL python2-tracer, python3-tracer, tracer-common update

Support
1

A couple of days ago a new version of python2-tracer, python3-tracer and tracer-common was published on EPEL 7 or EPEL 8.

The package katello-host-tools-tracer has a dependency to these packages which were originally installed from the foreman client repositories, e.g. CentOS 8:

python3-tracer-0.7.1-2.el8.noarch
tracer-common-0.7.1-2.el8.noarch
katello-host-tools-tracer-3.5.3-1.el8.noarch

EPEL 8 now has:

python3-tracer-0.7.3-2.el8.noarch
tracer-common-0.7.3-2.el8.noarch

It is safe to update these or should I better wait until the new version is also available through the foreman client repositories?

2

Hello, I am building a new Foreman/Katello environment and have been testing server builds and encountered issues with the latest version of python3-tracer and tracer-common.

The tracer utility that is provided by package katello-host-tools-tracer-3.5.3-1 reports the following messages when executed:

/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/tracer/packageManagers/rpm.py:201: UnicodeWarning: decode() called on unicode string, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1693751
  package.description = hdr[rpm.RPMTAG_SUMMARY].decode()
/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/tracer/packageManagers/rpm.py:202: UnicodeWarning: decode() called on unicode string, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1693751
  package.category = hdr[rpm.RPMTAG_GROUP].decode()
/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/tracer/packageManagers/rpm.py:208: UnicodeWarning: decode() called on unicode string, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1693751
  package.version = hdr[rpm.RPMTAG_VERSION].decode()
/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/tracer/packageManagers/rpm.py:209: UnicodeWarning: decode() called on unicode string, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1693751
  package.release = hdr[rpm.RPMTAG_RELEASE].decode()

Foreman traces for the server also reported old inaccurate status.

After downgrading packages tracer-common and python3-tracer to version 0.7.1-2, tracer execute as expected and tracer uploads correctly reported the status of the server to Foreman.

Based on this information, I would say stay away from 0.7.3-2 for now until the katello-host-tools-tracer tool is updated to be compatible with it.

3

There is another tracer update available now: version 0.7.4-1 in EPEL 7 and EPEL 8. On EL8 it fixes those UnicodeWarnings.