Using OpenShift.io for che plugin/devfile registry going forward

Summary

Currently, Che uses openshift.io for default plugin and devfile registries. This will likely cause issues going forward, as those plugin registries are updated independently from the plugin and devfile registry images. In particular, these registries will likely have to be updated alongside releases of Che in order to maintain compatibility.

We need to define clear expectations on the update schedule for the production registries, and accommodate defaults in Che to work with these expecatations. I think that upstream Che should not use production deployments for SNAPSHOT builds.

Relevant information

Today, we ran into an issue where all Che deployments from the current snapshot version fail to start workspaces. This is because

• Che was updated to use eclipse/che-theia/7.0.0 instead of eclipse/che-theia/7.0.0-next: https://github.com/eclipse/che/commit/f50d13337536d2ff5fd3cd26236a1ac6921dc5bd#diff-2de0b0a873741f8e0d0879a46f8d5266L651
• The plugin registry was updated to remove eclipse/che-theia/7.0.0-next and replace it with eclipse/che-theia/7.0.0: https://github.com/eclipse/che-plugin-registry/commit/191df1e76efdc1db993947d66a23f8aaff8b5eec#diff-81a58be1dc1db6f64c386b8e5b5b2057L4
• The registry deployed on che.openshift.io is not automatically updated, so it does not contain eclipse/che-theia/7.0.0

Updating the production registries would mean breaking any workspaces that reference eclipse/che-theia/7.0.0-next directly or use it as a default. Further, since there’s a manual update process for production deployments, we can’t in general expect nightly releases to be available on production.

[johnmcollier]

Note that Che deployed via ./deploy_che.sh will also use the hosted registries.

[amisevsk]

This issue is out of date as Che gets deployed with compatible registries by all supported deployment methods.