From the web UI and the documentation, spacewalk seems to want to download everything in a given repo regardless of relevance, which isn't so bad if you use all / most of the packages within a repo, but which is intense overkill if only one or two packages from a repo are used and the repo contains 10k packages.
In my particular case, I'd like to be able to keep only tomcat
(within the epel
repo) and its dependencies synced within its own subchannel, while leaving all the other, unnecessary epel
packages untouched (and undownloaded).
This was the only way I found, but it seems like kind of a kludge and (creating a local repo to proxy the packages I'd want) and it isn't clear to me that that solution even accounts for dependencies gracefully (my gut tells me it doesn't).
edit: In case you're wondering how I can sustain such impressive confusion about a basic aspect of spacewalk, allow me to apprise you as to the state of the current documentation (as of this edit, those headings have nothing).