Kubernetes Operator: publish versioned static manifests

[irbekrm]

What are you trying to do?

At the moment we publish versioned Helm charts, but we tell folks who want to use static manifests to download them from this repo's codebase.
That has a few issues:

• there isn't a clear and defined way how to install the operator at a given Tailscale version using static manifests
• operator and proxy images in the static manifests are still tagged with unstable which is incorrect and also forces us to set the image pull policy to Always that causes issues for folks, see K8s operator - imagePullSecrets are not propagated to proxy pods #10648

How should we solve this?

Publish the manifests to Github releases, see i.e https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases

What is the impact of not solving this?

• difficult for users to build automated workflows that retrieve static manifests
• difficult for us to improve the manifests, because we need to assume that it will be installed with a static tag, see K8s operator - imagePullSecrets are not propagated to proxy pods #10648

Anything else?

Alternatively, we could change our installation with static manifests documentation to recommend that folks use helm CLI to generate static manifests at a given version from the published Helm charts. However, that would introduce dependency on the helm CLI for folks who don't use Helm.

[mpstefan]

As the PR has been merged, marking this as complete.

[davidsbond]

@mpstefan this ticket should remain open, while my PR was related it does not fulfil this feature request. This issue specifically talks about how we use generic "stable" and "unstable" images with our static manifests. Instead we should make pinning image versions as part of the release process for static manifests and upload them somewhere (github releases maybe) that has the pinned versions.