UX for consuming a specific version of bundle and list of available bundles

[praveenkumar]

After #3277 and #3315 we want a way for users to choose the bundle. As of now crc config set bundle <bundle_version> is one of the option and time being can be used but more important part is how user know which all bundles are available for them to use.

• Do we create a metadata file and put it crc.dev which have entry for different preset bundle with download link?
• Do we just pull that info from quay (all the available tags for a specific preset bundle)?
• Or any other way ...

Another thing is once we have manual bundle update in place then do we need the automation to always make use of latest available bundle or let user choose which one to use?

[cfergeau]

Another suggestion was to extend crc bundle to be able to fetch/list remote bundles, local bundles, cleanup old bundles from local cache, ...

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[cfergeau]

Some thoughts around this issue:

What I would like is

• a way to start with the latest 4.12.x bundle
• an easy way to start with the bundle this was tested/released with. Specifying a URL does not qualify as easy.
• I'm fine with requiring that the user specifies a URL/... if they want to use 4.11.x, 4.13.x bundles, ..., though a --bundle-version=4.11.7 shortcut would be nice
• expanding on the idea in the previous item, maybe add a --bundle-version parameter/config value or such, which also accepts latest and default?

Various categories of people who might want to stick with older bundle versions:

• users hitting weird regressions, and want to check if this bug was happening with the default bundle or not
• users using crc eg in CI, and who want to stick with a specific version (though this use case can be dealt with crc config set bundle ...)
• bundle download is a lengthy process, some users may want to avoid it and stick with whatever bundle they are currently using until they decide they want the latest one.

[praveenkumar]

We shouldn't support any bundle version with any crc version because this will add a lot of burden to us, we should just move forward so if a crc version 2.15.0 released with 4.12.3 then older bundle (i.e 4.12.2) with same crc version shouldn't be supported (put a warning) and all the new bundles which created after it should go through test pipeline before make it available through quay/content-gateway/... .

It will allow us to be sane in term of shipping atleast tested bundle and have less bundle on support matrix.

2.14.0 ---> 4.12.1, 4.12.3, 4.12.5 ...etc 2.15.0 ----> 4.12.7, 4.12.9, 4.12.10 ..etc

[cfergeau]

In my post, I'm only talking about what we let people do from crc's command line, I did not imply anything about what is supported (as in "tested and for which we'll take bug reports"). I agree that we'd only be testing what you listed. But I don't think we should totally block usage of 4.12.1 on 2.15.0, or of 4.12.10 on 2.14.0. Having a way to indicate it's not tested/supported would be good though.