With both 2012 winding down and Pulp 2.0 approaching release, I wanted to lay out some information on where Pulp will be going in the new year.

Pulp 2.0 Release

For the past few weeks, we have been focusing on getting the next version of Pulp in a releasable state. The release is nearly complete and the final beta build should be available before the end of this week.

This is a good time to mention another house keeping item. The entire team will be on vacation starting on December 24th and extending until January 2nd, so don’t be surprised to find the chat room quieter than usual. That said, the community itself is rather helpful, so any questions will likely still be answered.

Following that, the release should be during the first week of January. However, anyone looking to get an early start over the holiday should feel free to use the release candidate build which will be located in our beta repository. This build will very likely become the final release when we return in January.

Pulp 2.0.x Release

When the 2.0 release becomes available, it will unfortunately not support upgrading from a 1.1 Pulp installation. That functionality is largely finished but still needs some polish and testing. I’m looking to release a minor update in mid-February containing this functionality.

Alongside this release will be the Pulp Developer Guide. That guide will contain:

  • Documentation on our REST APIs
  • Documentation for integrating with Pulp’s event notification system over HTTP or AMQP.
  • Guides for using the plugin infrastructure, including information on writing server-side plugins, client-side extensions to the client, and agent handlers to field requests for new content types.

Pulp 2.x Releases

Going forward, I’m looking to have a much more regular release cycle. The plan is to have a new point release every three months. Each release will feature a handful of marquee features, minor tweaks and improvements, and, of course, bug fixes. The 2.1 release is planned for early April and will feature the first pass at the v2 implementation of CDS functionality.

I’ve even gone so far as to start putting together a roadmap to facilitate this release cycle. I have every intention of making the roadmap visible, I’m just still trying to figure out the best way to do that. I’ll post more about it when I come to a decision.

Beyond

Once 2.0 is released, one of the main focuses will be adding support for new content types. As a team, we have plans for what we want to support. In addition to that, we want to encourage contributions from the community. Interest has already been expressed by a number of people for writing support for Debian packages. The Developer Guide is the first major step in this direction. Future work will also focus on providing libraries to facilitate the more mechanical parts of plugins, such as components to support more robust downloading of files (throttling, proxy support, duplicate file detection) from an external source.

Alongside the point releases, I’m looking into setting up a demo of sorts to talk about the new features and give the community a chance to provide feedback directly with the team. I’m still figuring out the technology (conference call, google hangout, etc.) and I’ll have more information in the future.

Wrapping Up

This is probably a good time to both thank and congratulate the team on an impressive year. The work on 2.0 has set us up to greatly increase the capabilities of Pulp well beyond simply supporting RPMs and errata. I’m excited to see where we go from here.