Some capabilities do not involve any cluster-version manifests. 4.14's DeploymentConfig is one example, and we landed OCPBUGS-20321 as a one-off hack to ensure that 4.13 clusters updating to 4.14 had the capability enabled (either implicitly or explicitly). We expect more such capabilities in the future, e.g. for other OpenShift API server types. This ticket is about designing a process, such as an openshift/api map or slice, for component administrators to declare a capability as having no cluster-version manifests. The CVO can then pull that structure in with the vendor-bump to 4.y that happens alongside the dev-branch vendor bump that pulls in the new ClusterVersion CRD, and no further code changes would be needed in 4.y to get the new capability implicitly enabled on 4.y to 4.(y+1) updates.

Definition of done, either:

• Land an enhancement around this issue. Create follow-up tickets in this epic for any API and CVO changes that the enhancement calls for. Or
• Decide this is too complicated, and that we are willing to punt until we actually need this kind of functionality before building it.