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Feature
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Resolution: Unresolved
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Critical
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None
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None
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BU Product Work
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False
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False
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100% To Do, 0% In Progress, 0% Done
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0
Feature Overview (aka. Goal Summary)
Generally speaking, customers and partners should not be installing packages client-side, i.e. `rpm-ostree install $pkg` directly on the nodes. It's not officially supported outside of troubleshooting situations, but the documentation is not very explicit on this point and we have anecdotal data that customers and partners do in fact install packages directly on hosts.
Adding some telemetry to help understand how common this is among data-reporting clusters. Hopefully such data will help us understand how important it is to preserve this ability in the bootc-world. While it's not a pattern we want to encourage, we should be careful about dropping it without considering how to avoid breaking users' clusters in unexpected ways.
Goals (aka. expected user outcomes)
Understand what % of machines (or a proxy thereof) have locally layered packages which aren't CoreOS extensions.
Requirements (aka. Acceptance Criteria):
This needs to be backported to 4.14 so we have a better sense of the fleet as it is.
4.12 might be useful as well, but is optional.
Questions to Answer (Optional):
Why not simply block upgrades if there are locally layered packages?
That is indeed an option. This card is only about gathering data.
Customer Considerations
Some customers are known to layer packages locally but it's worse if the issue is a third party integration. In such a case, if the add-on breaks, the customer will call the 3rd party first because that's what appears to be broken. It may be a long, undelightful trip to get to a satisfying resolution. If they are blocked on upgrade due to that 3rd party integration they may not be able to upgrade the OCP y-version. That could be a lengthy delay.