Pulp

Problem¶

Currently, the Pulp import/export code divides up Content (and its related information) into RepositoryVersion folders when exporting. At import time, a new task is launched for each folder to import this Content and automatically create a new version of the Repository with all the Content that gets imported[0].

The problem is that DistributionTree Repositories have Content that is not directly tied to the new RepositoryVersion. Instead, this Content belongs to subrepos.

As pulpcore handles the association of Content to Repositories, pulpcore needs to provide a way for plugin writers to be able to map Content to particular Repositories.

Solutions¶

The naïve solution would be to export RepositoryContent. But this is somewhat problematic as RepositoryContent has no helpful information: it has a repository id (instead of the repo natural key), a content id (another non-natural key), and version information (which probably won't match the downstream).

Option 1¶

Create a json dump that matches repository name to a list of content upstream_ids. After the content is imported, the upstream_ids should match the upstream pulp instance and the import code could simply go through and create a new repo version for each repository name. If there are no changes, Pulp will automatically not create a new repo version (which is the current behavior).

Option 2¶

Add repository name to each exported Content unit. This seems like a simple solution but its implementation is a bit more complex. There are a few obstacles like figuring out how to handle Content units that might belong to multiple Repositories (do we export the Content multiple times?). Also we'd have to tell the Content model resource to populate the field but ignore it during runtime and then extract this mapping of Repository to Content to build our new repo versions.

[0] https://github.com/pulp/pulpcore/blob/7157e4452bb3e1c480217a037829c34dcbf5bc75/pulpcore/app/tasks/importer.py#L135-L150