John Belamaric

Since we are cataloging dependency-related thoughts here I figured I would include this from @BernardTsai-DT in a Nephio [discussion](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xvuQTAO0n4ggvOaX6s8Y4vxqp_2h8xjB_JJetjlikN0/edit?hl=en&forcehl=1&disco=AAAAfGPXJwc). I thought this was an interesting set of categorizations to think...

Is this intended to be bulk changes across packages *within* a cluster, or bulk changes of a package *across* clusters, or both? It may be helpful to separate those user...

Another approach, which at least in this conception does not use pinned commits but instead uses the package lifecycle states to control rollout: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kpt/issues/3455#issuecomment-1212485912 I believe it is possible to...

> Related: When gathering inputs, we may need to allow network access: #2450. And probably a way to provide credentials. Do we need to solve this in the CLI case...

A few quick thoughts, all slight variations on "fetch from external system": * Read from a CMDB or other external database * Allocate from IPAM or other external system *...

* Read from the cloud provider API. For example, if an app is dependent on a DB application, that may be another subpackage, or it may be a cloud provider...

> Yes, mainly I think we need an `ensure`/`generate` SDK that helps with: > > 1. Merging changes between the function, other functions, and user manual edits *Ok, so I...

Yes, now that you mention it I did at some point look at that and it looked promising. I'll have to go back and revisit it. Has anything with respect...

Ah, yes, I handle that in pre-v1.0 kpt with a two-pass pipeline, haven't looked at v1.0 kpt closely enough, hopefully there will be a similar solution available.

Thinking about this a little more, it does seem that subpackage is the right model. The explicit version in the Kptfile gives us the ancestor for the 3-way merge, so...