Debian Support

What exactly does "content from local media" mean?

It is already possible to upload individual debian packages (or a folder of debian packages) as follows:

pulp-admin deb repo create --repo-id 'test' --relative-url 'test'
pulp-admin deb repo uploads deb --repo-id 'test' --file <path_to_deb_package>
pulp-admin deb repo uploads deb --repo-id 'test' --dir <path_to_dir_containing_deb_packages>
pulp-admin deb repo publish run --repo-id='test'

(Just an example).

Admittedly this does not appear to be documented anywhere.
If this covers the needed use case we could just write some documentation?

quba42 that sounds perfectly reasonable

Is there anything kept in the Debian repo metadata that would not be transferred by this approach? If so, how difficult would it be to implement a full "sync-like" behavior pointing at a Debian repository on a local disk?

I am not entirely sure, but I think the uploads mechanism is intended for a pile of debian packages, and not for a fully structured debian repository. It will probably ignore any Release files and publish any packages under a single release + component.

The only workaround for a "local sync" I can come up with is serving the local Debian repository on some local webserver and syncing it as if it was a remote source.

It is unlikely any major new features will still be added to pulp_deb for pulp2 and who knows what exactly pulp_deb for pulp3 will ultimately be capable of...

It is indeed correct that mirroring an offline repository is not supported in the current implementation. This is not unlike the yum plugin, where a full yum repository cannot be imported either.

I don't know without checking what underlying library both plugins use, maybe syncing from a file:// URL might work, but either way it's not ideal, since you'd have to copy the repository to the pulp server. Temporarily bringing up a web server to serve the repository is indeed simpler.