RFC: Sunsetting rubygem-foreman_scap_client and its repository
This post is long overdue, please bear with us.
Some time ago we started on writing an alternative version for foreman_scap_client binary because of the following reasons:
- The main one is that it raised RHEL compatibility issues. Mostly when FIPS was enabled.
- Written in Ruby, thus requires more maintenance due to Ruby versioning, its libraries or other gems that are dependencies of Ruby itself or the wrapper.
- For its functioning it requires Ruby to be installed on the client hosts, which might be totally unnecessary given Ruby is only used by the wrapper.
We decided to rewrite the wrapper logic into Bash version. It surely would benefit to be all Shells compatible, but Bash is a dependency of the oscap utility [0] itself giving us some preference here. There are few benefits over the previous implementation:
- It’s more lightweight (no Ruby involved).
- Uses only utils OS already has (or what gets installed along
openscap-scanner). - Should allow us less maintenance due to its simplicity.
Currently we ship both implementations stating rubygem-foreman_scap_client RPM package is being obsoleted by foreman_scap_client_bash in client repos. In the future we will only ship the latter.
Please, consider this as a notification to migrate to foreman_scap_client_bash instead and consider rubygem-foreman_scap_client unsupported for development. In case of issues or enhancements you can open them against the new repo [1]. The old one [2] will be archived.
[0] - openscap/openscap.spec at main · OpenSCAP/openscap · GitHub
[1] - GitHub - theforeman/foreman_scap_client_bash
[2] - GitHub - theforeman/foreman_scap_client