Pulp

Intro¶

@dkliban asked me some feedback (pain points) about trying to put Pulp3 in place.

Background on my use case¶

In the company I work for, we use ansible in our automation process. And in our automated deployment we provision infrastructure with Debian, OpenSuse and SLES. So for now we manage a server that mirror repos for all those distro. This is a collection of different tools apt-mirror, createrepo, RMT, wget and rsync glued with shell scripts and published with half thousand(for now) of soft links.

So I was interested to put in place Pulp3 with deb, rpm and file plugin on a Debian 10 host, installed with Ansible playbook pulp_installer.

Pain Point List¶

I think that most of all my expectations was something more mature, closer to 'Production ready' tool.

• I expected some CLI as user interface, as I think that a big part of public for this tool is SysAdmin. Even API is a great interface, it's not comfortable for SysAdmin to manager repos (even more true we it needs to discover how it works)
• The lack of external doc, like "tuto: How I mirror Centos and Debian with Pulp"…
• Some confusion if the doc/tool is for Pulp2 or Pulp3
• Yet another issue tracker to rise issues (I didn't try really hard but my attempt to auth with github failed…)
• The doc to install doc tells you that the prefered method is with Ansible but don't explain you how. Just redirect you to a git repo where you have to found the corresponding doc, which is not easy to find and which is not in line with the latest version on the repo (already explaned that point)
• The pulp_installer don't list the system prereq. That's sad because, at least on a fresh installed Debian 10, the playbook fails. I had to add some packages and force the ansible_python_interpreter get the work done.
• On the project page you tells that Pulp can manage plainty of repo type, but in fact if you take a fresh version only few plugins are working. Is there at least a compatibility/status matrix explaining that?

Thanks¶

Nevertheless, I wanted to close on a more positive point, the IRC channel is highly responsive, and people hanging out there are full of goodwill. Thanks for that!