Older helm chart versions disappeared

[mbrt]

What happened:

After 9f686e3, a bunch of older versions of the chart disappeared.

After that commit, it seems to be no longer possible to install those versions.

Note how, installing e.g. v.1.1.0 is not even possible by using a different branch or tag in the repo, because the index always points back to the master branch.

What you expected to happen:

I would expect that all stable versions after v1.0.0 keep being available indefinitely, or there's a documented way to get them.

How to reproduce it:

The easiest for me is to create a kustomization.yaml file in a local directory:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

helmCharts:
- name: azurefile-csi-driver
  version: v1.1.0
  repo: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/azurefile-csi-driver/v1.1.0/charts
  releaseName: azurefile-csi-driver
  namespace: kube-system

And run:

$ kustomize build --enable-helm .
Error: Error: chart "azurefile-csi-driver" version "v1.1.0" not found in https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/azurefile-csi-driver/master/charts repository
: unable to run: 'helm pull --untar --untardir /home/mbrt/tmp/azurefile-csi-driver-v1.1.0 --repo https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/azurefile-csi-driver/master/charts azurefile-csi-driver --version v1.1.0' with env=[HELM_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp/kustomize-helm-158786256/helm HELM_CACHE_HOME=/tmp/kustomize-helm-158786256/helm/.cache HELM_DATA_HOME=/tmp/kustomize-helm-158786256/helm/.data] (is 'helm' installed?): exit status 1

Note that this fail whatever URL you pull the chart from (as mentioned above).

Possible fix?

An easy fix would probably be to add back the releases to index.yaml and have them just point to older tags in git, where the files were not deleted. This would keep the number of directory in master low without breaking old releases.

[andyzhangx]

@mbrt are you still using v1.0.0 version? that version was released more than 3 years ago, it's out of support already.
You could add following repo address if you still want to use that version:

helm repo add azurefile-csi-driver https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/azurefile-csi-driver/release-1.0/charts

[mbrt]

@andyzhangx uhm, unfortunately we have a production cluster stuck at Kubernetes 1.16 and azure-csi-driver v1.1.0 is the latest version supporting it. Until we finish migrating off of that thing, we still need the version.

Although your suggestion works for v1.0.0, it doesn't for v1.1.0. Yes, we can vendor the chart inside out GitOps repo, but I thought that stable releases disappearing looked somewhat unnecessary, so I decided to report here.