Manually enforce reconciliation in the face of exhausted retry contingent

[makkes]

The documentation says that

The reconciler can be told to reconcile the HelmRelease outside of the specified interval by annotating the object with a reconcile.fluxcd.io/requestedAt annotation
but that only works when the number of retries has not been exhausted, yet. Currently, the only way to enforce another reconciliation of a HelmRelease is a deletion of the resource and waiting on it getting created again from Git (or manually if no Git repo is involved).

I would like to propose changing the behaviour of the reconcile.fluxcd.io/requestedAt annotation to always reconcile even if the number of retries is exhausted.

[stefanprodan]

I would like to propose changing the behaviour of the reconcile.fluxcd.io/requestedAt annotation to always reconcile even if the number of retries is exhausted.

I agree, right now only the HelmRelease Kind behaves like this, but I guess @hiddeco will have a different opinion.

[hiddeco]

[..] right now only the HelmRelease Kind behaves like this, [..]

This is not true, the requestedAt annotation requests a reconciliation, which the controller does like all other controllers. Where the controller differs from e.g. the kustomize-controller however, is that it does not perform a blind apply (or Helm release in this case) nor endless retry, because this would cause the storage to drift.

Due to this, and because the release itself is a long running process, I think it should be a separate annotation which on the CLI side is used as a replacement for requestedAt, when you run flux reconcile ... --force. Which effectively disables the remediation strategy (and limitations) for that reconcile.

[stefanprodan]

because this would cause the storage to drift.

Right I forgot about this, so we need a different annotation for the helm API only, that the CLI sets when --force is set.

[hiddeco]

The question is if the annotation only ignores the failure count of the defined remediation strategy (remediateAt?), or if it does more.