File Support

The basic problem is that the importer is determining there is no content in the remote repository that needs to be added to the local (pulp) repository. Nothing to do.

We need to take a holistic approach here.

Few options:

1. The user is responsible for triggering a repository-download task when changing the policy to immediate.
2. The policy change (to immediate) could trigger a repository-download task automatically. But, what if this fails?
3. The policy change needs to be noticed by the plugin (perhaps with help from the platform). Upon noticing this, the plugin needs to attempt to download artifacts just as it does when adding content (to the repository) that already exists.

The last option involving the importer is least desirable. It adds unwanted complexity to every importer. Either 1 or 2 or combination of 1 and 2 seems like the best idea.

Thoughts?

I just did the following on my core-master et al dev system:

pulp rpm remote create --name dell --url http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/dsu/os_independent/ --policy on_demand
pulp rpm repository create --name dell --remote dell
ppulp rpm repository sync --name dell
pulp rpm remote update --name dell --download-concurrency 5 --policy immediate
pulp rpm repository sync --name dell

The second sync downloaded all the content, as you can see from the task output:

pulp task show --href /pulp/api/v3/tasks/395fec3f-1a2e-4965-baa0-9fad2d09afb6/
{
  "pulp_href": "/pulp/api/v3/tasks/395fec3f-1a2e-4965-baa0-9fad2d09afb6/",
  "pulp_created": "2021-06-14T16:57:18.061465Z",
  "state": "running",
  "name": "pulp_rpm.app.tasks.synchronizing.synchronize",
  "logging_cid": "b6023513cb594a98b51dcc71870e6ecc",
  "started_at": "2021-06-14T16:57:18.180855Z",
  "finished_at": null,
  "error": null,
  "worker": "/pulp/api/v3/workers/49e49578-edd5-4c67-b3f3-dbf9fde8a4a1/",
  "parent_task": null,
  "child_tasks": [],
  "task_group": null,
  "progress_reports": [
    {
      "message": "Associating Content",
      "code": "associating.content",
      "state": "running",
      "total": null,
      "done": 0,
      "suffix": null
    },
    {
      "message": "Downloading Metadata Files",
      "code": "sync.downloading.metadata",
      "state": "completed",
      "total": null,
      "done": 4,
      "suffix": null
    },
    {
      "message": "Parsed Packages",
      "code": "sync.parsing.packages",
      "state": "completed",
      "total": 634,
      "done": 634,
      "suffix": null
    },
    {
      "message": "Downloading Artifacts",
      "code": "sync.downloading.artifacts",
      "state": "running",
      "total": null,
      "done": 454,
      "suffix": null
    }
  ],
  "created_resources": [
    null
  ],
  "reserved_resources_record": [
    "/pulp/api/v3/remotes/rpm/rpm/f4b27411-a886-4d8b-85f1-06d3925f8282/",
    "/pulp/api/v3/repositories/rpm/rpm/c146463f-6dc0-46a2-b50f-896996a9ed6e/"
  ]
}

I think we're good - but additional testing would be great.

Since the issue description is referring to importer, I am not sure whether this is really a pulp3 thing. I also tried to reproduce the error on pulp3 with the file plugin (similarly to Grant) and I could not reproduce it while having the pulp_file and pulpcore master branches checked out. If it is related to pulp3, then we can close this issue.