This is just a ramble.

I have been working on my homelab recently, which means more Kubernetes installs. In this process I discovered that google has deprecated their RPM packages. You can read about this here.

What is interesting is I came across a load of sites that carry basic instructions on how to install Kubernetes (essentially just summarizing the documentation) that have not been updated to reflect this change, announced in August, 2023.

So the new version looks like this:

[kubernetes] 
name=Kubernetes 
baseurl=https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.29/rpm/
enabled=1 
gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.29/rpm/repodata/repomd.xml.key 

I did some research to better understand the approach with the static version numbers. As you might have clocked, this will prevent an automatic update to K8s without making a manual change. There is an article dedicated to this topic.

some important points are quoted:

Unlike the legacy package repositories, the community-owned package repositories are structured in a way that there’s a dedicated package repository for each Kubernetes minor version.

and…

Note: This step is only needed upon upgrading a cluster to another minor release. If you’re upgrading to another patch release within the same minor release (e.g. v1.29.5 to v1.29.7), you don’t need to follow this guide.

and…

This document assumes that you’re already using the community-owned package repositories (pkgs.k8s.io). If that’s not the case, it’s strongly recommended to migrate to the community-owned package repositories as described in the official announcement.

This is a nice way to keep serious enterprise software on the right major versions while continuing to offer minor updates across the whole supported codebase.

Perhaps some minor updates on third-party documentation is in order too!