Questions about package management

[jlewi]

How would users upgrade a registry package in their app?

I think it would be useful if I could update the prototypes on which my components are based and then have my existing components reflect those changes.

How do packages depend on prototypes in other packages?

I'd like to have a core kubeflow package that reuses other packages (e.g. JupyterHub, TfJob).
I think my kubeflow package could just import the libsonnet files from those packages. But this means the user would be responsible for installing those packages manually.

[hausdorff]

Currently you can't upgrade -- this is coming soonish, but so far we have only supported the official packages, so this hasn't been an issue.

Packages can't really depend on other packages -- eventually they will be able to, but probably not until 0.8.

[redbaron]

How package update is going to be implemented? right now slightly modified prototype is installed into components/.jsonnet , that prototypes calls into pkg directly. Given that prototype is arbitrary amount of code we can't really be updating package without updating corresponding component.

[shomron]

@redbaron any materialized components would not be automatically upgraded - that would be the authors responsibility.

@jlewi Following up on this issue, upgrading packages is supported in ksonnet 0.12.0.

ks pkg install registry/package@version allows you to install a specific version of a package. This will upgrade if a previous version of that package was previously installed.
For GitHub registries, version can be a tag, branch or other refspec. Ksonnet will resolve that to a specific commit at the time the command is run. Thus, to track a branch during development, simply run ks pkg install regsitry/package@branch, which will always bring in the tip.

One other feature to note is that you can now install different versions of a package per-environment (ks pkg install --env <envName>...). This allows you to stage newer versions of a package in a separate environment before promoting it to production.

Give these features a spin and let me know if you have any questions!