Confusion on helm chart source/repository

[joshuabaird]

Describe the issue

I'm confused (and others are too) about where the source for the "official" fluent-operator Helm chart lives.

There are two chart sources published:

• https://github.com/fluent/fluent-operator/tree/master/charts/fluent-operator
• https://github.com/fluent/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/fluent-operator

The first chart (in the fluent-operator repo) is included in the documentation for installing fluent-operator. This chart doesn't seem to be regularly updated properly (the appVersion is out of sync with the current app version, etc) nor is it published to any Helm repository.

The second chart (in the fluent/helm-charts repo) does appear to be updated and is published to fluent.github.io/helm-charts.

This is extremely confusing for both maintainers and users of the Helm chart. As it stands currently, it seems that contributors are expected to manually sync changes between the two charts (which doesn't always happen). Secondly, the first Helm chart is not published to a repo which makes it more difficult to use.

Should we do do the following?

• Remove the Helm chart from https://github.com/fluent/fluent-operator/tree/master/charts/fluent-operator
• Update the fluent-operator README to instruct users to use the chart hosted at https://github.com/fluent/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/fluent-operator
• Update any contributor docs to instruct contributors to publish Helm chart changes to https://github.com/fluent/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/fluent-operator
• Optionally work on automation to release a new version of the chart at https://github.com/fluent/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/fluent-operator

How did you install fluent operator?

No response

Additional context

No response

[joshuabaird]

@wenchajun @benjaminhuo @wanjunlei Any opinions or thoughts?

[benjaminhuo]

• https://github.com/fluent/fluent-operator/tree/master/charts/fluent-operator
• https://github.com/fluent/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/fluent-operator

Currently, the first one is the most updated which needs to be synced to the second whenever a new release is out.
You can consider the first a dev branch while the second is a release branch.

Some kind of workflow is need to automatically sync the dev helm chart to the second repo whenever a release is out

[joshuabaird]

I'll take a look at how fluent-bit and fluentd handle this, but I do think it's confusing the chart is published in two places.

Furthermore, if the second one is intended to be a "release" helm chart, our "install" documentation shoukd reference that chart/repo and not a tarball from this repo. Agreed?