[che-dev] Making the registry field mandatory

[Mario Loriedo <mario.loriedo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Recently we have discussed a proposal to make the parents "registry" field mandatory in the devfild v2 spec.

For example:

parent:      # NOT VALID
  id: nodejs

and

parent:      # VALID
  registry: registry.devfile.io
  id: nodejs

The reason is to enforce repeatable workspaces: if the registry is not explicitly specified Che, odo or any consumer of the devfile, will pick its default registry and the resulting workspace will depend on the local definition of the parent.

The drawback is that when using a local or custom devfile registry (as we do for Che today) the devfile registry URL is unknown until the deployment. The getting started devfiles should be patched with the correct URL. If the devfile registry URL is updated by the admin the example devfiles should be updated too.

We currently do not use parents in our sample but we plan to in the next months and the same applies when we reference che-theia plugins registry in che-theia-plugins.yaml files.

Is there any concern in making the registry field mandatory?

Mario