[Pulp-dev] Content types which are not compatible with the normal pulp workflow

[Brian Bouterse]

I think Pulp does have enough value proposition over a script-based
alternative to make it worthwile for all of those types of plugins. Here
are a few points I think about:

* scalability. A common story users tell is that scripts work well up until
a point. Doing it for an entire organization, or when content comes from
many places, or with more than a few people involved in maintaining the
content, it becomes unmaintainable.

* Stacks of content. Often a group of content goes together, but each piece
of content is updated separately. For instance with Ansible roles, you may
use many of them together to deploy something, but each role may receive
changes separately. I think of all this content together as a "stack".
Keeping everything up to date can be challenging. Managing that change with
scripts can be hard and fragile. Also the ability to rollback quickly an
confidently is something Pulp can offer.

* Organizing content is easier. Having an API that you can use to organize
content is easier than doing lots and lots of git yourself or with scripts.

* Tasking. Long running tasks (and a lot of them) can be unweildy, and Pulp
makes that very organized and run very well.

* Static and vulnerability analysis. We're seeing interest in using
analysis projects like Clair (https://github.com/arminc/clair-scanner) to
scan content in Pulp. By bringing all the content into one place, and that
place having a tasking system that plugin writers can control how their
content can be analyzed continuously.

Also +1 to jortel's idea. I think that's a great idea and exactly what we
need.


On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Jeff Ortel <jortel at redhat.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 05/17/2018 07:46 AM, Daniel Alley wrote:
>
> Some content types are not going to be compatible with the normal
> sync/publish/distribute Pulp workflows, and will need to be live API-only.
> To what degree should Pulp accomodate these use cases?
>
> Example:
>
> Pulp makes the assumptions that
>
> A) the metadata for a repository can be generated in its entirety by the
> known set of content in a RepositoryVersion, and
>
> B) the client wouldn't care if you point it at an older version of the
> same repository.
>
> Cargo, the package manager for the Rust programming language, expects the
> registry url to be a git repository.  When a user does a "cargo update",
> cargo essentially does a "git pull" to update a local copy of the registry.
>
> Both of those assumptions are false in this case. You cannot generate the
> git history just from the set of content, and you cannot "roll back" the
> state of the repository without either breaking it for clients, or adding
> new commits on top.
>
> A theoretical Pulp plugin that worked with Cargo would need to ignore
> almost all of the existing Pulp primitives and very little (if any) of the
> normal Pulp workflow could be used.
>
> Should Pulp attempt to cater to plugins like these?  What could Pulp do to
> provide a benefit for such plugins over writing something from scratch from
> the ground up?  To what extent would such plugins be able to integrate with
> the rest of Pulp, if at all?
>
>
> I think OSTree and Ansible plugins will be in the same boat as Cargo.  In
> the case of OSTree, libostree does the heavy lifting for sync and
> publishing and I suspect the same is true for Git based repositories.  We
> should consider way to best support distributing (serving) content in core
> for these content types.  I suspect this will mainly entail something in
> the content app and perhaps a new component of a Publication like
> PublishedDirectory that references an OSTree/Git repository created in
> /var/lib/pulp/published.  This may benefit Maven as well.
>

>
> We don't have to commit to anything pre-GA but it is a good thing to keep
> in mind.  I'm sure there are other content types out there (not just Cargo)
> which would face similar problems.  pulp_git was inquired about a few
> months ago, it seems like it would share a few of them.
>
>
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