[rorychatt]

> staging->prod is a merge

I might be misunderstanding what you mean by staging in this case. If so, my bad!

I don't think staging ever actually gets merged into prod via git history, but is rather maintained as separate commit trees.

The way that I visualised the steps in this flow was something like:

  - Developer Commits code to feature branch
  - Developer Opens PR to Main from feature branch: Ephemeral tests, linting, validation etc occurs
  - Dev Merges PR
  - CI checks out main, finds the helm charts that have changed, and runs the equivelant of `helm template mychart`, and caches the results
  - CI then checks out staging (which is an entirely different HEAD, and structure), finds the relevant folder where that chart will sit, wipes the contents, and checks in the new chart contents.
  - Argo watches branch, applies changes as they appear
  - CI waits for validation test process to occur
  - CI then checks out prod, and carries out the same process (i.e. no merge step from staging to production).

In that model, there isn't actually ever a merge conflict that can occur between staging and prod, because you're not dealing with merging at all.

The way you then deal with a delta (like ver 1.0.1 in your earlier example) is to create a PR directly against the Prod branch, and then next time you do a full release, it just carries out the usual process, 'ignoring' what was there previously.

It's basically re-invented the terraform delta flow, but instead of the changes being shown via Terraform by comparing state and template, it's comparing template and template in git.

> ultimately couldn’t get the tooling and workflow to fit together when I last tried this

I genuinely feel like this is the bane of most tooling in this space. Getting stuff from 'I can run this job execution on my desktop', to 'this process can scale across multiple teams, integrated across many toolchains and deployment environments, with sane default' still feels like a mess today.

edit: HN Formatting