[LU-1273] lbuild-sles11 and self-service capabilities

• Type: Improvement
• Resolution: Done
• Priority: Minor
• Assignee: WC Triage
• Reporter: Michael MacDonald (Inactive)

Description

Currently, lbuild-sles11 is unable to service build requests for kernels that haven't already been downloaded by hand into lbuild-data. The package/repo management for SLES has made this difficult, as the command-line tools provided (zypper, yast) don't work very well for package download (zypper requires root privileges, even for download-only mode), yast is just a frontend for their curses-based system management tool.

We do now have a local cobbler mirror of SLES11 updates (http://cobbler.lab.whamcloud.com/cobbler/repo_mirror/updates-sles11.1-x86_64/) which is periodically refreshed. In theory, we ought to be able to teach lbuild-sles11 to use wget/curl to grab the kernel packages it requires from this local mirror.

This may or may not be desirable, in that it would introduce a dependency on the environment we have set up locally. Perhaps it could be generalized a bit to default to our local mirror URL, but be overridable via an environment variable (e.g. SLES11_MIRROR_URL=${SLES11_MIRROR_URL:-http://cobbler.lab.whamcloud.com/cobbler/repo_mirror/updates-sles11.1-x86_64/}) which at least gives outsiders a chance to set up their own mirror and use it without needing to modify lbuild-sles11 locally.

Or we could just keep doing things by hand, with a documented process for dealing with sles kernel updates.