I'm seeing this on the consumer side when pulling from the OpenSUSE 13.2 main repo: https://pulp.plan.io/issues/1322

I'm going to get off of master for the time being, and test this on 2.6.

What is the minimum amount of work required to distribute a yum repo as a YaST repo?

To answer that question, I've found this rather helpful document: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Creating_YaST_installation_sources

As far as I can tell, these are the major differences between a yum repo and a YaST repo:

• yum repos are organized somewhat arbitrarily, as a directory containing rpm packages and a repodata dir that lets clients make sense of it all
• YaST repos are more structured, with a top-level directory containing a few metadata files, including one that says which directory contains all the packages (organized by architecture) and the repodata dir

metadata files¶

These files are based at the root of the repository, and are both required.

The media descriptor file¶

media.1/media can be created at distribution time. The content of this file is as simple as

Pulp
YYYYMMDDhhmmss
1

Regarding the first field, "Pulp", the docs for this file state that this field "...should contain an identifier to quickly verify the media set the media belongs to. This identifier is not shown to the user but should contain human-readable data for debugging purposes".

The content descriptor file¶

content can also be created a distribution time. It has several fields available for use, documented here, but I'll outline what I believe are the fields we should (or must?) include, based on what I've seen in "real" openSUSE repos:
CONTENTSTYLE, DATADIR, DESCRDIR, DISTRO, LINGUAS, VENDOR

CONTENTSTYLE must be first in the file, and must be set to 11 (identifies this as a Code11 YaST repo, which we're impersonating)
DATADIR is the directory (specifically: a subdirectory in the same directory as the content file) where the packages are contained. The DATADIRs that I've observed contain packages sorted into dirs by arch, as well as #repodata@, which we already know how to make
DESCRDIR is a little bit tricker. It's created by an awesome perl script (redundant, I know) that you can find linked on the "Creating_YaST_installation_sources" page in the openSUSE repo, or you can look at the one that I've conveniently attached to this ticket. :) I expect we'd reimplement this in python, if this hasn't already been done (I haven't looked).
DISTRO appears to be an undocumented abbreviation of DISTRIBUTION, which (acording to the docs) is "Some string denoting the distribution. The same string is most probably used in the .rpms to denote the distribution. Usually a composition of name version and flavor." Based on that, I expect we can (probably?) snag it from the packages. Given the requirement that it's "some string", I'm not sure how important it is that this contains a useful value.
LINGUAS (not LANGUAGES, apparently) is a space-delimited list of languages supported by this repo. I'm not quite sure how to populate this, but it's related to what we generate at in the DESCRDIR step with the create_package_descr script, and is possibly derivable from package metadata.
VENDOR is, predictably, the name of the repository vendor. In our case, likely "Pulp".

LABEL is the nicely-formatted human-readable string that will be shown by packaging tools using this repo. It is not required, but seems like a nice thing to do. :)

In addition, there are META, HASH, and KEY tags, which all contain the expected hashes of non-package files that may be downloaded from this repo (e.g. the packages files found in the DESCRDIR)

Conflicting information¶

The wiki page for the content file include a section (at the time I write this, at least) with a little bit of Q&A, specifically someone asking what fields are required:
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Standards_YaST2_Repository_Metadata_content#Not_documented.2Funclear

It says that NAME, VERSION, BASEARCHS, and VENDOR are required. But, based on the content file for the main opensuse repo, that can't be true. Only VENDOR can be found in this file, despite it clearly stating CONTENTSTYLE 11:
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/13.2/repo/oss/content

When conflicts like this appear, it seems preferable to defer to the actual repo that openSUSE users connect to, rather than relying on potentially outdated wiki docs. It would probably also be good to correct their wiki where possible.

Cryptography¶

gpg¶

The content file may be signed, by including content.asc alongside the content file. Additionally, the public part of the key used to generate that signature can be included in content.key.

https¶

Nope!

In the iso installer, I wasn't able to get openSUSE to even do https without booting into the advanced install env. Even when I did, my pulp install was using a self-signed cert so I was never able to establish a connection from the installer due to a lack of trust. The repositories published by openSUSE itself are not secured by HTTPS, instead appearing to completely rely on the GPG-signed content file.

openSUSE provisioning is something that is out of scope for pulp, and should be handled by foreman/satellite. The satellite team is still identifying the steps that would need to be taken to get feature parity in satellite 6 (via foreman) to what we have in satellite 5.

Pulp can help foreman out a little bit by exposing the contents of isos, which I've opened as story #1391.

closing with NOTABUG, since this wasn't a bug. :)