This card follows up the work for OTA-1351 and might help simplify the work for OTA-1455.

1. About rust version:
There are different rust versions are involved in CI and production: at least 3 of them at the moment:

• 1.64 and 1.70 in CI: https://github.com/openshift/release/blob/cbaea286dfff3d2590be6f372b8a418fc0c9429a/ci-operator/config/openshift/cincinnati/openshift-cincinnati-master.yaml#L32-L33
• 1.76 in production: https://github.com/openshift/cincinnati/blob/d6c64b486bb764d56614bb876e9cf9f5e95a9f68/dist/Dockerfile.deploy/Dockerfile#L16

Could we use 1.76 everywhere?

Could we do one way only to install rust? Either rust-up or dnf install -y jq rust cargo but not both of them.
rust-up may avoid waiting for the most recent versions are picked up by dnf.
But OTA-373 seems to prefer to dnf/rpm.

2. Do we still need the customrust variant? Could/Should centos be replaced with with ubi if we have to keep the variant?

It seems that we are in the process of moving to dnf but did not finish it for some reason.

2.1. All the tests in customrust are included in master.

2.2. The differences observed between master and customrust variant:

• image/e2e-test is built differently: centos vs ubi9

• promotion only in "customrust":
  https://prow.ci.openshift.org/view/gs/test-platform-results/logs/branch-ci-openshift-cincinnati-master-customrust-images/1902013033744437248

  INFO[2025-03-18T15:21:26Z] Promoting tags to registry.ci.openshift.org/cincinnati-ci/cincinnati-build-root:${component}: deploy, e2e-test, src-rust  name=promotion
  

Those promoted images are used in other OTA repos: cincinnati-graph-data + cincinnati-operator.

grep -r 'namespace: cincinnati-ci' ./ci-operator/config | grep -v 'public'   
./ci-operator/config/openshift/cincinnati-graph-data/openshift-cincinnati-graph-data-master.yaml:    namespace: cincinnati-ci
./ci-operator/config/openshift/cincinnati-graph-data/openshift-cincinnati-graph-data-master.yaml:    namespace: cincinnati-ci
./ci-operator/config/openshift/cincinnati/openshift-cincinnati-master__customrust.yaml:    namespace: cincinnati-ci
./ci-operator/config/openshift/cincinnati-operator/openshift-cincinnati-operator-master.yaml:    namespace: cincinnati-ci

2.3. The raw_steps seems no longer used. https://github.com/openshift/release/pull/63305