up2date vs rhn-applet-gui

[Marc Williams]

Let me see if I finally have this straight...

- up2date and rhn-applet-gui are two entirely different utilities
neither of which have any dependency upon the other.  Almost unrelated
except in purpose.

- up2date uses the contents of /etc/yum.conf for its purposes

- rhn-applet-gui uses the contents of /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources for its
purposes

Now for the questions.

1) Assuming the above is accurate, would there be any point in having
the resources pointed to by those files be different i.e. having a
update mirror in one but fedora.com in the other?  If not, then why
aren't they combined into one file?  They look like they do pretty much
the same thing to me...

2) What is the purpose of https://xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC showing
up as a RHN server in up2date-config?  It doesn't seem to do anything.

Thanks for any insights.  I'm just trying to understand things better.