Operator SDK: Support human-readable file-based catalog

Goals

Support Operator authors and pipeline teams in how to set up, strategize, and publish Operator releases.

Why is this important?

OLM and PE team are actively working on a more flexible and human-readable way to manage Operator catalogs (aka, File-based Catalog, FBC) for Operator authors to strategize in how to publish their Operator releases.

Operator SDK wants to:

• make sure all SDK commands being used by the pipeline teams, e.g. in CVP or in ISV Preflight Checks work well with the File-based Catalog.

• support Operator authors to learn how to leverage File-based Catalog to publish their Operator releases.

Deliverables

• Operator SDK commands used by the pipeline teams work well with FBC (e.g. "run bundle” and “run bundle upgrade" commands)

• Scaffolds example GitHub Actions (or Tekton Tasks) for automatically creating bundle artifacts and automatically publishing them to a file-based catalog so users can learn and easily leverage file-based catalog for managing releases.  --> out-of-scope
  • Will track this feature in OCPPLAN-7744: Declarative Index Config instead