Host patching based on Environment (PROD vs DEV, etc...)

I realize this is covered by the docs and tips and tricks from Summit.  I am still curious how others are going about managing their own host deployments and management.  I feel as though I am missing a key aspect of how Satellite was intended to be used.

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We have multiple environments – PROD and DEV.

Let's say that we want to roll our DEV hosts to a point in time (2013-02-01) and validate them at that point. Once validation is complete we would like to roll our PROD hosts to the same point.

We have

rhel-x86_64-server-6 (ALL)

-- jbappplatform-5-x86_64-server-6-rpm (1 of 3)

-- rhel-x86_64-server-optional-6 (2 of 3)

-- Dell-OMSA (2 of 3)

-- rhn-tools-rhel-x86_64-server-6 (ALL)

So – would clone the base channel and all the children (via CLI)? And then literally resubscribe the systems from one release point to another? If so, how do I easily make sure that the children channels they were subscribed to are retained? I.e. So that when I am done only the 1 system is subscribed to the Jboss channel, 2 systems are subscribed to rhel server optional, 2 subscribed to the Dell channel and all of them still have rhn-tools-rhel-x86.

What are my other options? I do not like the idea of changing the subscriptions based if they won't retain their original base-to-child relationships. Unfortunately I only have the one Satellite to test with and I don't want to blow the poor thing apart ;-)

On a possibly related note: do people find value in the spacewalk-clone-by-date command? 

 Thanks