Wish: Foreman/Katello versioning

May I propose a change in the version numbers to bring foreman and katello in sync?

It’s always wrecking my brain if I have to think about which foreman version goes with which katello version (and which pulpcore version in this matter, but that’s a given).

So, maybe when you go into the next major version for foreman and/or katello, instead of going to foreman 4.0 and katello 6.0, go to foreman 6.0 and katello 6.0 and keep then in line from then on. I think that could be helpful at times…

Add the satellite version to this for maximum of confusion! :wink:

I remember a similar topic where it was at least considered to go this route, but I can not find it any more.

And I feel your and our wish can be completed soon :beers: RFC: Bumping the Foreman and Katello to common version

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Seriously? It’s still five months till christmas and my first wishes already come true? Cool. :wink:

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Further discussions in the RFC and among developers has also led to this RFC:

Discussions have pointed out that our projects aim to have meaningful versioning about each project and things like major deprecations can lead to versioning becoming unaligned. We are looking at strategies that help get to what we feel is the heart of the feedback: how does a user know what the right Foreman and Katello versions that go together are. Our hope is through the release RPM RFC to help alleviate this, simplify installation instructions and help prevent potential installation of the wrong combination.

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Thanks for the feedback. When I posted that my only focus was on the foreman and katello versioning. I didn’t mean for all plugins, projects, etc. to be in sync. Just the two big “variant” foreman and katello. Those are the two options in the docs. Then it would be just one version number and you have either foreman with katello or foreman without katello, e.g. foreman 5.0 or foreman/katello 5.0 and not foreman 3.3/katello 4.5…

Enforcing dependencies in release rpms to make sure foreman and katello repositories in use are matching is of course a good idea, however, doesn’t help at places where you don’t use the repo files but provide the rpms through katello.

As I noted in the RFC: it is indeed not a solution to that, but it can make the path easier. If we change the installation instructions to dnf install https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/3.4/el8/x86_64/katello-release.rpm, this makes it easier to make changes to yum.theforeman.org/katello.

One of the main obstacles I see in changing that structure is the naming. If you use the Foreman numbers in /katello/x.y you will at some point overlap with Katello’s numbers. We can introduce /katello/foreman-3.4 but that may also be confusing. I’d love to hear good suggestions.

You can skipped a few numbers in foreman and get foreman version in line with the next katello. As I wrote in the beginning: