Embed pipeline in pipelinerun on start

[siamaksade]

When a pipelinerun references a pipeline and the pipeline definition changes after pipelinerun execution, it's impossible to know how the pipeline looked like at the time when pipelinerun was started. Specially when the pipelinerun fails.

Embedding the pipeline via pipelineSpec in the pipelnerun when starting pipelines via tkn p start would eliminate this problem and shows the exact pipeline definition at the exact time when the pipeline run was executed.

This behavior could be the default behaviour but allow for a user to enforce referencing a pipeline via a flag e.g. -force-pipeline-ref, if there is a use-case for it.

[chmouel]

/kind feature

I think it would be good to talk about it at the tuesday meeting..

[danielhelfand]

This sounds very similar to what exists for TaskRuns, but its use case is for a different purpose. There is a -f flag that lets a user start a Task that does not exist in a namespace. This is accomplished by parsing a local or remote file where a Task is defined and adding it to the TaskRun's TaskSpec as shown here.

[vdemeester]

I am 👍 on this. As @sthaha asked during the WG, maybe we could even embedded the TaskSpec in the Pipeline (that is set in the pipelineSpec of the PipelineRun 👀) in order to have a full spec that do not reference anything external.

• By default use pipelineSpec, have a flag to use pipelineRef instead
• By default use taskSpec in the PipelineSpec, if the user decided to use pipelineRef, keep the PipelineSpec as is
• Make sure even if we use pipelineSpec we know which Pipeline it originated from (aka setting the correct label/annotation)

@siamaksade what do you think ?

[siamaksade]

That is very useful. Would make PipelineRun a complete immutable snaptshot of both pipeline and tasks at the time that it was created.

[vdemeester]

I think this can be closed because of tektoncd/pipeline#2489 and tektoncd/pipeline#2444.