Working of SUSE Manager Importer tool

The basis for SUSE Manager is the channel. A channel is a grouping of one or more packages associated with a product repository. A patch released by SUSE is called as an erratum in SA and a collection of these patches is called errata in SA.

Channels are of two types:

  • Parent channels
  • Child channels

Parent channels are usually, but not necessarily, associated with Pool repositories, whereas the Updates repositories are considered as child channels of a Pool repository. In addition, there are other types of child channels that are not Updates repositories.

Note If you import a label into SA that is associated with the Pool channel, no erratum or errata will be imported because Pool channels do not have patches associated with it. If you import a label associated with the Updates channel, a channel software policy is created that contains all packages from errata.

The SA SUSE Manager Importer supports both parent and child channels. The command line options allow you to group all imported errata for a particular channel into a single software policy.