Why almost all helm packages are DEPRECATED?

Question

I just installed Helm v3.4.2 and the command below prints many packages as DEPRECATED in the description:

helm search repo stable

Output:

stable/acs-engine-autoscaler            2.2.2           2.1.1                   DEPRECATED Scales worker nodes within agent pools 
stable/aerospike                        0.3.5           v4.5.0.5                DEPRECATED A Helm chart for Aerospike in Kubern...
stable/airflow                          7.13.3          1.10.12                 DEPRECATED - please use: https://github.com/air...
stable/ambassador                       5.3.2           0.86.1                  DEPRECATED A Helm chart for Datawire Ambassador
...

Why only 18 on 284 packages are not deprecated ?

Do that mean for these packages we have to add external repositories ?

Answer 1

The underlying reason "why" is that the CNCF no longer wanted to pay the costs in hosting a single monolithic repository:

https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/10/07/important-reminder-for-all-helm-users-stable-incubator-repos-are-deprecated-and-all-images-are-changing-location/

This means that the charts are now scattered across various repositories, hosted by a range of organisations.

The Artifact Hub aggregates these so you can search them:

https://artifacthub.io/packages/search?page=1&ts_query_web=mysql

We're now in a very confusing situation where if you want to install a package, you're very likely to find several different repositories hosting different versions and variants, and you need to decide which one to trust and go for.

Very likely many of these repos will get deprecated themselves.

It's all a bit wild west right now, and it's a shame there is no longer a single "stable" one shop stop.

Answer 2

According to cncf.io

On November 13th, 2020 the Stable and Incubator Helm chart repositories will be deprecated and all Helm-related images will no longer be available from GCR. Users who do not switch image locations to their new homes and update any chart from the stable/incubator repos to their new homes will potentially run into issues.

This is also mentioned on Helm Charts github.

This project is no longer supported.

At 1 year, support for this project will formally end, at which point the stable and incubator chart repos will be marked obsolete. At that time these chart repos will likely be garbage collected and no longer available. This git repository will remain as an archive.

This timeline gives the community (chart OWNERS, organizations, groups or individuals who want to host charts) 9 months to move charts to new Helm repos, and list these new repos on the Helm Hub before stable and incubator are de-listed.

Many maintainers have already migrated their charts to new homes. You can track the chart migration progress here.

For example ambassador moved to datawire.

helm/charts has been deprecated and will be obsolete by Nov 13 2020. For this reason, the datawire team as retaken ownership of this chart.

The Ambassador Chart is now hosted at datawire/ambassador-chart.