Api methods related to patch generation

[shawkins]

Is your enhancement related to a problem? Please describe

Currently PatchUtils is in the impl, so you can't normally directly call jsonDiff or the related withoutRuntimeState methods. We may want to expose that. Additionally there is a related problem - detecting when a resource has changed. The ResourceCompare utility is in the api, but it currently just looks at all fields in the metadata. It ideally could be more flexible / quick - such as just comparing the generation for the spec and then compare the non-managed metadata fields.

Describe the solution you'd like

Additional ResourceCompare and possibly PatchUtils.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[shawkins]

@manusa @rohanKanojia in looking at doing this work it seems best to deprecate ResourceCompare:

• it is not used internally in the codebase. I gather it used to be used by createOrReplace logic
• equals is not descriptive of what it is doing. It's checking instead if any of the non-null fields in the right entity have been changed in the left entity. That is a very specific type of check.

Any objections?