Deprecating Consumers

One of the core tenets in the Unix Philosophy is that programs should do one thing well. It's something we on the Pulp team believe in. In line with this philosophy, there have been a couple features in Pulp 2 that are being removed in Pulp 3 to better allow Pulp to focus on its primary goal of managing software packages. Nodes were one feature of Pulp 2 that got cut. Pulp's support for Consumers is another feature that we're not planning on supporting in Pulp 3.

Pulp 2 provided the ability to manage Consumers of Pulp content. With Pulp 2, users could use Pulp to install and track content on machines (called Consumers). However, there are number of tools available today that can do a much better job automating the installation/updating/removal of packages on Consumers. One such tool is Ansible which, for instance, has a DNF module for managing packages with the dnf package manager.

By focusing on our primary mission of managing software, we believe we can build a stronger product. That said, we'd love to hear from you, our Pulp users, about how you use Pulp and how this change will affect you. Feel free to reach out to us via our mailing lists or IRC to let us know.