Deprecation plans for Foreman on EL7, Debian 10 and Ubuntu 18.04

[jnana]

@evgeni

You don’t have to include pulp data in the backup, you can skip it and create the copy by some other means (rsync, whatever) and the restore will restore fine (minus the fact that you now have to provide the pulp data yourself). Just make sure whatever is on disk and in the DB matches.

Does this mean the following procedure (high-level) is possible?

1. We take a backup of a Foreman 3.1 + Katello 4.3 install on EL7 by running “foreman-maintain backup offline --skip-pulp-content”.
2. We set up a fresh install of Foreman 3.1 + Katello 4.3 on EL8/9, keeping the same hostname/IP.
3. We copy the /var/lib/pulp directory from the EL7 system to the EL8/9 system.
4. We restore the foreman-maintain backup from the EL7 system to the EL8/9 system. After the restore completes, we should have the same functionality and host/repo/subscription/CV/etc data that we did on the previous install, and nothing needs to be changed on the clients provided we keep the same certificates. This includes RHEL clients and repos.
5. We can continue to upgrade Foreman+Katello on the EL8/9 system as normal.

Interested in hearing your perspective on if this approach will work.