I have a personal repo in which I build various packages for a number of different targets including Fedora and RHEL. Up to now I have always built against CentOS for RHEL targets but since CentOS 8 doesn't have long to live, I thought I'd move over to using RHEL8 with a personal developer subscription.

Using this guide: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/mock/wiki/Feature-rhelchroots I have been able to get mock working with RHEL8 to do builds.

I am wondering what I will need to do when I re-install my builder with Fedora 35 when the time comes. Do I need to unregister the system whilst running Fedora 34 and then re-register the fresh Fedora 35 install? Or is there a way to carry forward the existing registration to the new installation?

The other problem I have is that I cannot get "dnf repoclosure" to work for the RHEL8 target. I use the same sort of repo configurations as used in mock but just get this:

Error: Failed to download metadata for repo 'rhel-rhel8': Cannot download repomd.xml: Cannot download repodata/repomd.xml: All mirrors were tried

If I try to run it as non-root, it's even worse, getting things like this: 2021-07-02 15:51:44,090 [ERROR] dnf:913533:MainThread @logutil.py:200 - [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/log/rhsm/rhsm.log' - Further logging output will be written to stderr 2021-07-02 15:51:44,127 [WARNING] dnf:913533:MainThread @logutil.py:154 - logging already initialized 2021-07-02 15:51:44,127 [ERROR] dnf:913533:MainThread @identity.py:156 - Reload of consumer identity cert /etc/pki/consumer/cert.pem raised an exception with msg: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/etc/pki/consumer/key.pem'

This all seems rather painful. Am I missing something?

I'm quite tempted to use Rocky or Alma instead, which I'd expect to be far less hassle.

Paul.