I’m wondering about this and whether it’s going too far or not far enough.
First of all, I think the model 1 (yum) repository is one pipeline is a good one. Tying multiple ones together can make it impossible to easily resolve dependency conflicts.
This is only partly related, but I’ve been mentioning this a few times. I think we should drop the Katello version number from the (yum) repositories. That means we no longer say katello/4.3 but rather use the correct Foreman version number (which is 3.1 I think). The benefit to users is that they no longer need to map the version together. On the packaging side branching also becomes easier.
That does raise the question: would it make sense to drop the Katello repository altogether and move to a single repository. That would also imply a single pipeline makes much more sense. To do so, we would need to move at least a few plugins to the main repository which could suggest to drop the plugins repository altogether. The downside of that is that any cherry pick of a plugin to a stable branch needs the full release pipeline and it would need to be signed. That in turn would solve Feature #4788: Plugin rpms not signed - Packaging - Foreman but bring an additional overhead to cherry picking.
I also raised this in a private discussion yesterday: today we have a release owner for Foreman and a release owner for Katello. However, could we end up with a single release owner who takes care of an entire release? We already have an installer maintainer taking care of the installer, rely on core maintainers to care for Foreman itself. Smart Proxy rarely changes these days, but you could have another group responsible for that. Then there are various plugin maintainers. Katello could be in that category.
On the other side: Foreman runs the Katello unit tests as well for every core PR but they break all the time and personally I’m ignoring them more often than not. We may end up in a similar situation where Katello is blocking things and nobody knows how to solve them. Timezones are an additional problem: most Katello developers are in the US and if you’re blocked until halfway through the day it quickly becomes very annoying.
So in short: I’m advocating for making Katello less special and more of a generic plugin. However, there are serious concerns over availability/reliability, both in people and technical.