During a flat repo sync, pulp_deb will record the user supplied distribution as the distribution for any structure content that is created.

During publish, pulp_deb will publish any distribution that ends in “/” (definition of a flat repo distribution), using a distribution of “flat-repo” in normal repo format.

We deliberately chose this design because we did not want to “lose the information of how the repo was actually synced”. However, we now believe this was a bad design choice:

• It caused a bug.
• If people query a pulp repo version for a distribution, they expect publications to use that distribution.
• We are opinionated that we transform an upstream flat repo into a pulp_deb publication using normal repo format. Then we should fully stick to that decision.
• We don’t actually lose any information, because we also store the original sync options for the optimized sync.

Proposal:

We should change the design to just store a distribution of “flat-repo“ for flat repo structure content, and then we should publish normally.