limber crescent
Just what it said.
Is it possible, or recommended, to have no owner for a catalog component?
One reason I might want to do is, is to populate dependencies I don’t know the owner of yet. Or for common libraries which don’t yet have a defined maintainer-owner group. Having no “owner” will expose the gap for us
if not, why not? What’s the philosophy behind making this required ?
Context, this throws an error: /spec/owner must be string
Type: Component
Spec:
owner: null
limber crescent
One way I could accomplish this would be to create a group “orphan-components” but. Still worth asking
kindred kite
Hi @limber crescent, ownership is one of the big values that Backstage provides. It drives a lot of features and it it what provides clarity around ownership. Having it required forces you to have that conversation and for a team to commit to owing things.
Yes, you can just put in a string and move on but then you are avoiding the conversation and losing out on having that information available to others. You'll find your adoption will stagnate and trust in the catalog will be lost.
limber crescent
I wonder how badly backstage would break if I replaced this to be optional. We shall see.
But yes, the goal was to have orphan-components so that we could have that conversation and can easily identify all the components that don’t have an owner
Thanks
kindred kite
Don't, that's a bad idea. You're essentially throwing away a key aspect of using Backstage and it will only bring you problems down the road. Like I mentioned you can just set it to a string and move on so if anything that would be the best approach.
spiral orbit
We created a group called unknown that we create reports on to help people understand what is missing
kindred kite
Yup, that’s a good approach @spiral orbit 🙏
spiral orbit
We also often have reorganizations and so team names move around so we also even if there is a team name still have to do a look up through the API to verify that the team is still really there and add that to the reports