As David and I discovered while discussing the plans to release CRW 2.1.1, we currently use https://github.com/redhat-developer/codeready-workspaces-operator/blob/master/deploy/operator.yaml with hardcoded :2.1 tags.

But since the imagePullPolicy for the operands is only Always for images with :nightly or :latest, if the 2.1.1 operator is deployed to replace the 2.1.0 operator, it's not guaranteed that the newer 2.1-20 server image will be pulled to replace the older 2.1-19 one.

We could generate digests here (as we do in operator-metadata and digests) but as this file i used by crwctl for deployments on OCP 3.11 (where digests are not supported) we therefore need the next-best thing: specific immutable tags.

So the proposal is that we transform https://github.com/redhat-developer/codeready-workspaces-operator/blob/master/deploy/operator.yaml via skopeo inspect and sed/yq into something that includes specific tags instead of rolling tags.

This new version of the file could then be pushed into a 2.1.x or 2.x branch so that master would remain a pointer to the latest.

However... it's not clear to me how crwctl build finds these files, and how we define the branch to use. dfestal is it something in https://github.com/redhat-developer/codeready-workspaces-chectl/blob/master/src/tasks/installers/operator.ts ?