Pulp

I don't have opinions on all of these choices, but here are a few first thoughts.

I see the use case as a user wanting to change their proxy config and they need everything now to use the new settings. Based on that understanding, I think we should avoid the templates approach and let the global settings be able to be changed once and take effect for all exiting importers.

Whitelisting a very limited set of fields that this can be done for I think would be safer than having a fully generalized version.

Keeping the config out of the DB will allow us to build less in terms of CRUD operations for that global config. +1 to having them just be a special file on the filesystem.

I'll have to think more about the other questions.

I've considered the idea of something like a "Download Profile" that could be defined separately from an importer, given a meaningful name, and associated with many importers. Examples a user might create:

• Local
• Proxy to Internet
• Proxy to Secret Internal Network

Excluding authentication, users likely don't want or need to have many variations of download settings. They want to use the same settings everywhere, with possibly a small number of use-case-based variations.

It would be good to get feedback on this general concept from users. I also wonder if katello is already doing something along these lines, managing profiles on top of pulp's settings.

+1 to @mhrivnak 's Download Profile idea.

+1. May want to name it an Importer Profile as it may not necessarily be restricted to downloading attributes.