Red Hat Satellite is used in a project we’re working on. I’ve been doing some scripting to the XML-RPC API in the last year and I think everybody should benefit from my experience. This is the first in a series.

Changes are you’ll deal with errata when you encounter yourself writing software to reproduce a software channel in another Satellite server because you can’t use satellite-sync. An erratum may hold RPM packages for different major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When you clone an erratum containing packages for, for instance, rhel5 and rhel6 – using errata.clone(), you’ll end up with the rhel5 and rhel6 packages in your cloned base-channel. Why? Because errata.clone() doesn’t consider the Operating System version.

Now what? Use errata.cloneAsOriginal(), it will clone only the RPM packages for the proper Operating System version.