M - Publishing to the CI Catalog and listing components on https://gitlab.com/explore/catalog
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Problem Statement
Please see testing comment for details.
After further investigationn, we came to realise that since cells 1.0 have different dbs and are not allowing public projects, we were unable to test the workflow for CI Catalog components communicating across 2 cells with cells 1.0.
Proposal
Short term solution: We could use project mirroring. Component would be created in a single instance and in another instance, the component project could be added as a repository mirror. This solution was described in this MR.
Long term solution: Since the component projects are supposed to be public, we could create an API that will pull in the component data for anyone who requests it: so any cell instance.
T-Shirt Size
Large because there of the unknowns at this point for how cells can interact with each other for components to be used if cells are designed to behave to act in silo.
Short term solution is potentially going to work in cells 1.0. This proposal will need to be further tested.
The long term API solution will require building endpoints to serve the data: singe component, all component per CI Catalog, all components per Namespace etc, really depends what the use case will be.
Timeline
This effort could be a multi-milestone/quarter effort depending on what programmatic changes need to be made to support the usage of components in separate cells.
NOTE: Though repository mirroring and FQDN can be used, it may be limited based on how Cells are designed too.