Presence of subscription-manager on CentOS 7 disables packagekit updates

[kai4785]

The cockpit-system package now "Requires: subscription-manager >= 1.13". This has two undesirable side-effects on CentOS systems.

1. cockpit-packagekit now disables updates because you are "unsubscribed", even though it shows you available updates.
2. yum loads the subscription-manager plugins by default, and yells at you every time you run yum.

# yum list cockpit
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, product-id, search-disabled-repos, subscription-manager
This system is not registered with an entitlement server. You can use subscription-manager to register.
Determining fastest mirrors

These issues can be worked around in multiple ways. Here's two.

# rpm -e --nodeps subscription-manager*

Or

# sed -i 's/enabled=0/enabled=1/' /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/subscription-manager.conf /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/search-disabled-repos.conf /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/product-id.conf
# mv /etc/dbus-1/system.d/com.redhat.SubscriptionManager.conf{,.back}

I think reasonable solutions include:

1. separating out a cockpit-rh-subscription
2. a work around that doesn't require such a heavy hand. (Can I disable a dbus interface with policykit?)

This issue is raised in a comment in issue #9156 , but I don't think the two issues related in anyway except they were released with CentOS 7.5.

[martinpitt]

This is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1505955 . But from the upstream side what we can do is to stop requiring subscription-manager on non-RHEL systems.

[martinpitt]

Actually this is already the case in the upstream builds, just not in the downstream ones, so I'm closing this upstream report. Downstream this will get fixed in RHEL/CentOS 7.6, as we are going to rebase cockpit there: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1568728

[shawly]

I'm on CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core) but this issue still persists, I can't update packages via cockpit because it tells me that I need a subscription.

[StewAlexander-com]

Issue still exists, and work around doesn't work

Centos Linux release 7.7.1908
cockpit-system-195.101.el7.centos.0.1.noarch