Introduce a Foreman Client Repository

Development RFCs
1

This idea has been broached a few times, but I wanted to officially propose as an RFC the introduction of a Foreman Client repository officially. As some of you may know, today the Katello plugin provides a set of client repositories for EL5/6/7 and for official Fedoras. The Foreman plugin repository contains some client specific packages but they are only available on latest and greatest EL and supported Debian server OSes. This would facilitate centralization of client tooling, provide more OS support for client tools that exist today and provide an avenue to develop new client focused tooling for core or by plugin authors.

Proposal

Introduce a set of client repositories for the following OSes based initially upon the Katello client repositories and deprecate their usage:

This client repository would be for ALL Foreman community projects that want to provide client bits. I do not see value in a “core” and “plugins” tools repository. This repository should rev and follow the standard Foreman release cycle however, we can discuss the idea of a version agnostic tools repository.

4 Likes
2

One benefit of this is that we can actually test Foreman without any plugins and no ability to install them. Currently we use hammer so we need the plugins repo enabled.

@TimoGoebel also wanted to package their client side tool to use the DLM plugin and this would be an ideal repo for it as well.

3

I had not considered hammer a client package at the time of my posting. This statement makes me think that you are thinking that direction?

4

Kind of. It isn’t strictly tied to Foreman. One tricky thing is that hammer is SCL’ed so I’d be ok with leaving it for now.

5

So it turns out I didn’t look right and hammer-cli and hammer-cli-foreman are in the main repository so we could already do an installation + testing without any plugins present. There have been requests in the past to allow using hammer without the main repository present though.