How is Foreman 3.3 / Katello 4.5 ready for Prime time?

Not sure really where to put this, Apologies if this is the wrong location.

How is Foreman+katello 3.3 / 4.5 ready for prime time?

  1. You have released this with a glaring bug still in place reported by at least one other person:
    Bug #35060: Deb packages uploaded in debian repository are not displayed - Katello - Foreman
    The target version for this fix was originally 4.5, now it has been pushed to 4.6? huh? How long is this going to take?
  2. Your upgrade documentation is STILL missing critical upgrade information here:

Under 2.1.1. Upgrading a Connected Foreman server:

  1. Update repositories

For Centos 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Users:

  • Instructions should be generalized from CentOS to either EL8 or include Rocky / AlmaLinux 8 / CentOs Stream 8 as examples.

Instructions need to include links to EL8. Currently only EL7 is shown:

yum update -y https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/3.3/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm

yum update -y https://yum.theforeman.org/katello/4.5/katello/el7/x86_64/katello-repos-latest.rpm

yum install -y centos-release-scl-rhstrong text

and 3: Ran into an upgrade problem / possibly ANOTER critical piece of documentation when trying to upgrade from Fore/man katello 3.2.1 / 4.4 as described here:

We really want to implement Foreman in our environment in place of Satellite, and perhaps contribute more to this community. But after watching some of the recent community updates, the Devs seem more interested in spending time adding more features, than fix seemingly relatively simple yet well known issues (the Debian custom repo issue is a recent one, having worked in prior versions!) that several people have reported on besides me. How long does it take to do a simple documentation update?

I hated to write this as the community at large seems very pleasant and helpful to work with, but as of not I am not comfortable starting the move to foreman just yet, especially with Bug #35060: Deb packages uploaded in debian repository are not displayed - Katello - Foreman being pushed back to Katello 4.6.

We really want to implement Foreman in our environment in place of Satellite, and perhaps contribute more to this community. But after watching some of the recent community updates, the Devs seem more interested in spending time adding more features, than fix seemingly relatively simple yet well known issues (the Debian custom repo issue is a recent one, having worked in prior versions!) that several people have reported on besides me. How long does it take to do a simple documentation update?

I hated to write this as the community at large seems very pleasant and helpful to work with, but as of not I am not comfortable starting the move to foreman just yet, especially with Bug #35060: Deb packages uploaded in debian repository are not displayed - Katello - Foreman being pushed back to Katello 4.6.

Regarding the bug I guess it’s always a question of people you have and timing. Katello/Foreman is kind of on an update schedule so you have to push 4.5 out at some point. It’s already bad enough that 3.3 was out for such a long time with 4.5 still in RC. I guess the whole concept of separate releases and versions for foreman and the katello plugin needs to be reviewed by the developers. It’s only a cause of confusion as people tend to install/update before it’s GA.

And for katello it’s bad enough because that depends on pulp and pulp is a different project, i.e. pulp bugs affect katello but are on a different schedule.

The docs are a whole different world and it’s not really the code developers who do the docs in the end, because docs are difficult in a completely different way. You have your own problems with text formatting in this forum, so you get the idea.

Whenever I upgrade I basically go through the installation docs. I look briefly through the upgrade docs but you are absolutely right that they are outdated. But you have to look into the installation docs anyway for changed system requirements etc. which is why I basically look into the installation docs and use those for upgrading. They are better. But as with most projects, docs are usually behind because writing docs and keeping them up-to-date is cumbersome.

Which is why more often then less, for smaller projects with limited resources you’ll have only very technical docs, api docs may, and user-friendly docs are sparse. And the situation is better for projects like foreman/katello where there are some company interests behind getting docs up to speed. But the transition from the old project docs to the new style docs is big, I guess, that’s why it’s still lacking and has some problems in itself. I’m not sure if it’s still the case but at some point it was quite easy to end up on the nightly docs without really noticing which lead people to install the nightly version which is usually not what they want…

But of course, docs are in github, I think you can also participate and suggest changes and submit PRs…

And know, I shared my good deal of issues during the last years as a user. If I only think about the months it took me to upgrade from pulp2 to pulp3 to get to katello 4.0…

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Thank you for the reply. I understand the limited resource / many moving parts and dependencies of Foreman/Katello/Pulp. I was just taken by surprise to see that the blank package /. custom Debian repo issue pushed back to Katello 4.6. Keeping documentation update is always a challenge. Cheers.

As @gvde mentioned its a matter of resources and time.
We try to release Katello 4.5 GA as close to 3.3 as possible. This sometimes means some of the remaining redmines are not going make it. That being said we’ll look into backporting when we do a 4.5.1 once we identify fixes. We are going to be reevaluating untriaged bugs this week including bugs moved to 4.6.

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Hi @csmagna,

As Partha mentioned, @gvde puts it well.

If you’re seeing documentation issues, the best place to express them would be here: Issues · theforeman/foreman-documentation · GitHub

We are trying to stick to a tight schedule when it comes to releases. The timeline is 3 months per release. Since upstream releases have a lot of moving parts, we encourage all community members to help push priorities on bugs before a release.

When you see a post about the latest Katello release process (like Katello-4.5.0 release process), consider checking if your redmine of interest has a pull request. If not, and folks aren’t clamoring about it in the forums, it’s more likely to be pushed off. That’s when you should post a comment on the release process thread about the critical fixes that you consider necessary for the release. Catching things like that during the RC phase would be best.

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Update: The updated documentation looks good now thank you. Easy upgrade from foreman 3.2.1 / katello 4.4 to 3.3/4.5.

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