Michael,

Thanks!  It sounds like you think the OES people should not be using such a method?  I can query it with the product management people there...

The issue here has been simply resolved for now by me with a minor modification to /usr/share/susemanager/salt/packages/init.sls but it's a crude solution because it relies on identifying an OES system by virtue of the fact that it's oscodename grain is 'SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP5' - so ancient that our OES servers are the only systems running this! So we can use it to identify OES

It would be better to have a grain specifically identifying Open Enterprise Server - if anyone is listening...
Pseudo code might be:

if exists /etc/novell-release

read version from file

create grain for OES version

Agreed - *-migration products should NOT be candidates for automatic installation - but I'm afraid I do not have the necessary skills to propose a modification to https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/blob/master/susemanager-utils/susemanager-sls/src/states/product.py

But if suitably knowledgeable person contribute, it's a job worth doing!

T