Preventing the PLP0000 error

RedHat Satellite 6.7 is 8 revisions old; on a product with presumably much more history.

We are seeing dozens of our content-views failing to publish, daily. Every one of them fails with the same error "Katello::Errors::PulpError: PLP0000: /var/lib/pulp/published/yum/https/repos/cob/content_views/cv-el6-add-epel/24.0/custom/thirdparty/6-epel-x86_64 exists, but should be a symlink. Cannot find published directory."

We currently run the workaround, for every one of them, and it's costing us some time. If we assume that this well-supported enterprise product enjoys widespread use, I'm stunned that we're seeing such a consistent failure so late in the game on what I hope is a standard install.

Some repos we are now feeding by an additional Cobbler host installed nearby, so as to give us filtering on the way in (hello, non-trapdoor-license chef) and to actually pull repos that are just beyond pulp's effort level (like gitlab).

This seems like a cheesy race condition. Are you still using the mob-scene scheduling of repo refresh, for instance, or did you back out to a serialized synch driven by a loop in a cron job to coddle this staggering disappointment so it can do the bare needful?

I've got a case open with IBM Global Support, but I worry trends will continue to hold this week as last week and decades before.

What have you done to cope with this failure[sic], and how did you work to avoid it?