Two artefacts, opposite answers.
Releases stay. They carry no assets -- the image lives in GHCR -- so one costs
a tag, a title and generated notes, and with no CHANGELOG in this repository
those notes are the only changelog there is. Deleting one destroys history
that cannot be reconstructed, and saves nothing.
Images accumulate: a multi-architecture build a week, and the by-digest push
leaves two untagged per-architecture manifests behind each time on top of the
tagged index. Ten tagged versions are kept, which is roughly a quarter of
releases and far more than anything anyone rolls back to.
The obvious tool for this is a trap. delete-package-versions with
`delete-only-untagged-versions` will delete the per-architecture manifests
that a multi-arch tag points at, because they are untagged by design, and
nothing appears to break: the tag still resolves and pulls simply start
failing for one architecture. This action understands manifest lists and
leaves a retained index's children alone, `validate` re-checks every
multi-arch manifest against the registry afterwards, and `latest` is excluded
from consideration entirely.
It is pinned to a commit rather than a major tag. It holds `packages: write`
and its whole purpose is deletion, so a tag repointed upstream is not a risk
worth carrying for the convenience.
Kept in its own file and dispatchable, so a dry run can show exactly what
would go without rebuilding and re-pushing an image to find out.
jcoffey-dev
4b2c97df4e