[opensuse-autoinstall] sle-sdk product no longer marked as installed in SP2/SP3

24 Oct 2017

      I recently noticed that an autoyast installation of SLES 12 SP3 did not show the the SDK as being installed (in the output of ‘zypper search -t product’), despite it being present in my profile, and 'SUSEConnect --list-extensions' reported it as registered but not installed.  Running ‘zypper install sle-sdk-release’ or ‘zypper in -t product sle-sdk’ afterwards will then mark it as installed.

Further testing revealed this to be the case in SP2 also, but for SLES 12 SP1, the sle-sdk product *is* still automatically installed.

I have had the mounted SLE SDK ISO listed as an add-on in my profile for many versions (going back to SLES 11 GA, I believe) much like this:
====
  <add-on>
    <!-- remember to also register add-ons under suse_register -->
    <add_on_products config:type="list">
      <listentry>
        <media_url>http://rgs-install.local/mounts/sles12/sp2/sdk1/</media_url>
        <product>sle-sdk</product>
        <product_dir>/</product_dir>
        <alias>SLE-SDK12-SP2</alias>
      </listentry>
    </add_on_products>
  </add-on>
====
And up through SLES 12 SP1, everything was fine.

For all SP versions, I see in the YaST logs stuff like this:
2017-10-24 15:42:44 <1> dhcp-116(3246) [zypp++] PoolItem.cc(setBuddy):168 U__s_(9458)product:sle-sdk-12.2-0.x86_64(SLE-SDK12-SP2) has buddy U__s_(7684)sle-sdk-release-12.2-1.124.x86_64(SLE-SDK12-SP2)

...but for some reason SP2/SP3 don’t automatically install sle-sdk-release any more.

Adding it to <packages>, either 'sle-sdk-release', or 'product:sle-sdk', is a suitable workaround, but I wonder what changed?
====
  <software>
    <packages config:type="list">
      <package>mlocate</package>
      <!-- <package>... -->

      <!-- pick one of these, they are equivalent: -->
      <package>product:sle-sdk</package>
      <package>sle-sdk-release</package>
    </packages>
    <patterns config:type="list">
      <pattern>Minimal</pattern>
      <pattern>base</pattern>
    </patterns>
    <!--
      Based on the schema file, this should work, but it does not:
    <products>
        <product>sle-sdk</product>
    </products>
    -->
  </software>
====

Andrew Daugherity
Senior Systems Administrator
Division of Research, Texas A&M University