If Application annotations are removed, parameter overrides are not removed

[argoproj-labs]

If Application annotations are removed, parameter overrides are not removed

[jannfis]

I see your point. However, currently there is no way for image updater to know the source of existing parameters in the Argo CD Application manifest, so it will be pretty close to impossible to remove previously set parameters without possibly removing other overrides from other sources (i.e. someone set an override manually)

One possible solution I could imagine is to extend the spec of Argo CD API to include the source of a parameter. In the Argo CD UI or CLI, we could set it to the name of the user who set the parameter. I think this might prove useful also for Argo CD. Since image updater is using the API directly, we could set it to argocd-image-updater to indicate it was initially set by the image updater. This way, we can simply select the parameters that have the correct source, see if we would set that parameter and if not, unset it.

One edge case this breaks would be someone who first tracks an image, and then decides to untrack it at a certain point in time (i.e. pause it, or completely stop tracking). If the annotations are removed from the Application CR, the actual parameter overrides would be removed too, which may not be the desired result.

Happy to discuss this use-case and possible solutions further.