Proposal: add chart source repository to the stored chart information in kubernetes

[bh-tt]

We migrated to OCI registries for helm recently, and one important question that remains is how to check for updates. Our current method involves adding a list of all (helm) registries we use and then trying to find a helm release name in one. We can likely do something similar for OCI registries, but this method has several issues:

• naming conflicts happen occasionally between registries, causing the check to return the wrong items
• it is quite slow and uses a lot of cpu, even for helm registries with all information locally stored after a helm repo update. I expect OCI repository will be even slower

In essence you need to know how a chart was installed in order to query these updates more effectively. I'd like to ask for this information to be added to the response from helm list -o json|yaml, which means it likely needs to be added to the information helm stores as part of a release.

I understand this is not possible for every type of chart (e.g. manually downloaded), but it should be possible to add this information when installing from a repository (both OCI and helm)? It might be as simply as adding the 'repository' key to these results.

Example current output of helm list. From this result its not possible to find some origin of the chart, and if you look at artifacthub there are >100 results for the name cert-manager:

$ helm list -n it -o yaml
- app_version: v1.14.4
  chart: cert-manager-v1.14.4
  name: cert-manager
  namespace: it
  revision: "7"
  status: deployed
  updated: 2024-03-11 09:07:40.204840481 +0100 CET