The current developer documentation is missing a lot of the details needed to get PulpDist checked out, get the plugins installed in Pulp and be able to successfully run the unit tests. In particular, setting up the file permissions needed to let Apache run the plugins from a source checkout in the user's home directory.
Another key missing piece is a quick overview of how to set up a demonstration data source with rsync for local experimentation.
Marking all remaining PulpDist issues as CLOSED-EOL It doesn't make sense to leave these issues open, as PulpDist hasn't been in active development for quite some time, and restarting development would involve a significant modernisation effort that would likely render many of these requests irrelevant.