Dear Uyuni community, I am writing because we are considering to drop one feature before the next version, that is the ability to create unpublished patches. Reasons are that, as of now, it seems to be obsoleted and unused, and its presence makes it more difficult to improve the codebase in other aspects (case in point is performance of channel management). Background: Uyuni allows users to create their own patches/errata (via WebUI or API). After a patch is created, it can be published or left unpublished[1]. When a patch is left unpublished, it is not part of any channel so it will just not be visible to any client. At some point users can publish an unpublished patch, and at that moment it will be seen normally by clients that have corresponding channels attached. In the vast majority of use cases, both the documentation and the Web UI assume that any "patch" is in fact a "published patch" - unless otherwise noted. The unpublished errata mechanism has been created very long ago (the earliest trace we found is 2002), when lifecycle tools did not exist at all. Today, instead of creating an unpublished patch, it would be advisable to use a regular (published) patch to a test channel instead - the Content Lifecycle Management feature for instance makes it easy to promote it once it has been tested successfully. Testing is just impossible with unpublished errata, which makes us believe the whole mechanism is basically redundant as of today. We would like to know if any of you uses this feature actively or can point out cases we haven't thought about so far. Unless we get a valid case in this thread, we will most probably proceed removing the feature and cleaning up the corresponding codebase soon, and that will open the door to further optimizations around channel management we hope to ship soon. Thanks! [1] feature is documented here: https://www.uyuni-project.org/uyuni-docs/uyuni/client-configuration/patch-ma... https://www.uyuni-project.org/uyuni-docs/uyuni/reference/patches/manage-patc... https://www.uyuni-project.org/uyuni-docs/uyuni/reference/patches/clone-patch... Regards, -- Silvio Moioli SUSE Manager Development Team -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: uyuni-users+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: uyuni-users+owner@opensuse.org