To be able to add OLM to Microshift, we will need to create two RPM packages:

• Manifest RPM contains all the required manifests (yamls) for kubernetes (Deployment, CRDs...) that would get `oc apply -k` into microshift. (deploy those manifests to "/usr/lib/microshift/manifests.d/olm")
• release file RPM that contains a list of images for the OLM version. (as in https://github.com/openshift/microshift/blob/main/packaging/rpm/microshift.spec#L83) (the images refs contained in this RPM should be references to ART generated images)

The creation of those RPMs should be automated; once an OLM release happens, a new set of RPMs should be generated so that microshift images can be updated with the new release.

From Doug Hellmann:

MicroShift will run `oc apply -k` against a set of directories to load manifests each time it starts up [6]. It does not constantly reconcile those manifests. Ideally we would produce an RPM that includes the manifests needed to cause OLM to be installed (Deployment, CRDs, etc.). Putting those files in a read-only location like /usr/lib/microshift/manifests.d/olm would make sense. To help users identify the container images they need to embed, we have a separate RPM with a data file in it that they can install onto a build host to examine (see the top of [5]). It's not used at runtime and nothing depends on the file. We'll want something like that for OLM, too.

[5] https://github.com/openshift/microshift/blob/main/docs/user/howto_offline_containers.md
[6] https://github.com/openshift/microshift/blob/main/docs/user/howto_config.md#auto-applying-manifests

We will need to figure out where the specs of those files will live and be maintained and built. 

From Doug Hellmann:

We should talk to ART about where the RPM spec file should live and how the RPM builds would work. There may be some process streamlining benefits of adding it to the MicroShift repo, and of course we would share maintenance responsibility with the OLM team if we did that. I'd also be happy to learn that adding an RPM to the OLM repo isn't a big deal. I suspect that it would make versioning independently easier if it was not part of the MicroShift spec, but I don't know how important independent version numbers are.