When MCE is built, it needs to incorporate the deployment and CRD definitions for the Hive operator.  Presently (MCE 2.0, similarly done for ACM 2.4 and earlier), it obtains this input by looking for stuff related to a designated OLM channel for the hive package in the community-operators-prod repo.  This was an approach first worked out back in ACM 1.0 days and not revisited since.

The MCE/ACM build has now pivoted over time to an approach where it obtains the "bundle" input it needs directly from components dev repos vs. needing stuff posted to community-operators-prod, and we'd like to make a similar change for how we incorporate Hive as well. 

Per convo with efried.openshift the current hack/bundle-gen.py  script generates the needed input, but goes on to do other things not needed in this scenario (creating/testing the image, etc.). 

So this ticket requests a chance to that script to add an option, say --bundle-only, to get it to just generate the manifest info and leave the results in a local directly.  With that option, the MCE build will be able to run that script to get the manifests it needs.

Later: It turns out MCE was also making use of the images referenced in the OperatorHub bundles. Hive is also requested to tweak bundle-gen to support producing those builds again based on a SHA, and push them to a configurable repo. MCE will incorporate this step into their build process as well as the step for the manifest info as described above.