Transitioning from DEPRECATED state?

[ajborley]

Apicurio restricts the transitions between states via the ArtifactStateExt class (1) but it seems that once an artifact is in DEPRECATED state it can only then transition to DELETED state. Typically, a deprecated resource is still usable, but will eventually become unusable, which I think maps to the DISABLED state in Apicurio.
Additionally, if a user accidentally deprecates an artifact, there is no way to reverse that action at the moment, beyond creating a new artifact.

Is there an expected lifecycle of an artifact version? My guess is something like the following:

ENABLED -> DEPRECATED -> DISABLED -> DELETED

With transitions permitted between any of ENABLED, DEPRECATED and DISABLED, but not from DELETED, which is a final irreversible state.

(1)

apicurio-registry/app/src/main/java/io/apicurio/registry/storage/ArtifactStateExt.java

Lines 39 to 43 in fe1282f

	transitions = new HashMap<>();
	transitions.put(ArtifactState.ENABLED, EnumSet.of(ArtifactState.DISABLED, ArtifactState.DEPRECATED, ArtifactState.DELETED));
	transitions.put(ArtifactState.DISABLED, EnumSet.of(ArtifactState.ENABLED, ArtifactState.DEPRECATED, ArtifactState.DELETED));
	transitions.put(ArtifactState.DEPRECATED, EnumSet.of(ArtifactState.DELETED));
	transitions.put(ArtifactState.DELETED, EnumSet.noneOf(ArtifactState.class));

[EricWittmann]

This is an interesting question, actually. I can see the reasoning behind the current approach. You can go from DEPRECATED only to DELETED if we assume that "Un-Deprecating" is not a thing that should be allowed. So in that case you can only go to DELETED as the next step because going into DISABLED state allows you to then go back to ENABLED.

In one sense I think the artifact version "state" is actually combining two concepts:

• Enabled/Disabled
• Deprecated

But I think what we've done is a reasonable simplification/combination of those concepts. The question becomes what state transitions should be allowed.

I think perhaps we have erred on the side of being too restrictive with our state transitions. As you say, accidentally deprecating something allows for no going back. I think I would argue that we should allow more transitions and trust users to create their own processes to properly utilize the states.

So that was all a long way of saying - yes let's allow DEPRECATED to ENABLED and also DEPRECATED to DISABLED.

@alesj @carlesarnal @jsenko thoughts?

[carlesarnal]

I'm not a big fan of allowing this kind of transitions but, if we do so, once we have authentication/authorization I would suggest restricting this kind of transitions (especially the DEPRECATED to ENABLED one) to concrete roles.

[EricWittmann]

That's a good idea. We should start a document around Registry roles and what those roles have permission to do.

[EricWittmann]

Fixed by PR #783