DSAPI is the ancient datasets API that imgadm used to retrieve datasets
(aka images). Years ago that was obsoleted by the IMGAPI.
In TRITON-742 the Joyent datasets.joyent.com has been retired. AFAIK
every real SmartOS image/dataset repository has switched to IMGAPI
(e.g. https://datasets.at, images.joyent.com, updates.joyent.com).
In OS-7841, imgadm's "dsapi.test.js" is being dropped from the test suite.
Former user commented on 2019-08-27T04:16:58.580-0400:
One draft of the work I did for OS-7601#icft=OS-7601 (channel support in imgadm) involved significant changes to the node_modules that imgadm used. In particular, we bumped it to a newer version of sdc-clients, and as part of that, we went through the changes needed to drop DSAPI from imgadm, writing an upgrade function to do the right thing in the face of any remaining configured dsapi sources.
The changes for that draft are captured at https://cr.joyent.us/#/c/6559/ in case they're useful for future maintainers.
During code review, we decided that the bump of sdc-clients was too hefty for the platform, and went a different route that involved backporting channel support into the current version of sdc-clients.