As a caller of Pulp's package upload API Katello is required to parse and generate the proper metadata in order to get packages into a repository. The algorithm and mechanism for doing this is somewhat complex and we have recently relied on Pulp's admin CLI python algorithm to accomplish the parameter/metadata generation for uploads. In the future we are going to want to support uploading packages from Katello's webUI which is in Ruby so we would be force to implement and maintain a parallel Ruby algorithm for parsing and generating the correct metadata for uploads. This RFE is to centralize this algorithm at the server so the client/call isn't required to be responsible for this semi-difficult task.
build: 2.4.0-0.7.beta
This can be verified by doing an upload of an RPM and watching ~/.pulp/server_calls.log to see what data gets sent. You will see that the unit metadata does not get sent to the server, but if you query the server for the new unit, you will see that it has the expected metadata.
verified as per the above comment 2014-07-07 15:54:46,383 - INFO - POST request to /pulp/api/v2/repositories/upload/actions/import_upload/ with parameters {"unit_type_id": "rpm", "upload_id": "f89df833-0597-48fb-8894-87794a6b2201", "unit_key": {}, "unit_metadata": {"checksum_type": null}}
This has been fixed in Pulp 2.4.0-1.