Thanks for the bug report.
I am having trouble finding any release of pulp_rpm that did include --auto-publish on the repo create or update command. It looks like that option is available in code, but is unused. It gets instantiated, but never added to a command.
I grepped all 2.8 releases for OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH, auto-publish, and autopublish as shown below. I didn't find anywhere that any of them get used.
I did find this line of code commented out, with a comment from 2012 explaining why:
https://github.com/pulp/pulp_rpm/blob/2.10-release/extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py#L124
So it looks to me like this has never been available in pulp_rpm, but if you can help us identify a release where it was available, that would bump our priority for adding it back.
$ echo $TAGS
pulp-rpm-2.8.0-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.1-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.2-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.3-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.4-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.5-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.6-1 pulp-rpm-2.8.7-1
[mhrivnak@dhcp129-40 pulp_rpm]$ for T in $TAGS; do git checkout -q $T; grep -r OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH; done
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)
Binary file extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.pyc matches
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py:OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH = PulpCliOption('--auto-publish', d, required=False,
extensions_admin/pulp_rpm/extensions/admin/repo_options.py: # publish_group.add_option(OPT_AUTO_PUBLISH)