RPM Support

You probably don't fully understand functionality of this option. since 'retain_old_cound' is a configuration parameter of yum_importer, when you update its value, yum_importer config is updated and with next sync( since yum_importer is responsible for getting the content into pulp) your change will be taken into account. It is the same as changing 'download_policy' for example. The change will be visible with next sync.

Hi Ipanova, Thanks for the reply.
I chatted with some of the great RH Devs on #pulp and the root of the confusion is that running a repo sync doesn't effect the intended change until the remote repo metadata changes due to an optimization in yum_importer. This isn't intuitive to the user but there is a workaround to trick the importer as discussed in the below IRC passage. Also in the below IRC passage are the plans for a future version of pulp that would head off this problem.

<mhrivnak> KodiakFiresmith, smyers that is a sync setting, not a publish setting.
<mhrivnak> And I bet it's not being applied, because the sync is being skipped.
<mhrivnak> Because the remote metadata hasn't changed.
<KodiakFiresmith> mhrivnak - I tried a sync afterward
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<mhrivnak> KodiakFiresmith, so I bet the second sync is skipping most of the workflow.
<mhrivnak> There's an optimization where at the beginning, it determines if the remote content has changed or not.
<mhrivnak> If not, it skips most of the workflow.
<KodiakFiresmith> ah - any way to ctrl+F5 a sync?
<mhrivnak> heh
<mhrivnak> We definitely intend to add a --force-full option. I don't remember if that's already in 2.9 or not.
<mhrivnak> There should also be an improvement so that if any config option has changed, it will do a full sync, but again I think that'll land in 2.9 at the soonest.
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<mhrivnak> you can trick it by doing this: add a type to the skip list with "--skip", sync, remove that from the skip list, and sync again.

--force-full sync option is not implemented yet, we would need to take same approach as we did with publish.

I'm not really privvy to the inner workings as an end-user, this issue was more just me putting it out there that there is an unexpected behaviour happening that might be good to re-work when the big redesign happens w/ Pulp 3.