[che-dev] [Devfile] Breaking change in devfile format

[Lukas Krejci <lkrejci@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

in our ongoing quest to make the devfile as nice to use as humanly 
possible, we're forced to make an occasional breaking change (lately, it 
might look like we break the format on *every* occasion - but it's for 
the good! ;) ).

This time, the breaking change improves the experience with components.

Up until now, each component has had to have a name. The name has to be 
unique among other components in the devfile. The name is pure metadata, 
it has no other purpose but to be able to reference the component in the 
commands.

But not all components are referenced in the commands and hence we were 
forcing the user to come up with a name that was unused and felt 
redundant when the component already had a kind of identifier (the id of 
the editors or plugins, the image of the dockerimage component or the 
"reference" of the k8s/openshift component).


This is going to be the case no more.
With https://github.com/eclipse/che/pull/13166 we're removing the name 
attribute of the components and replacing it with an optional "alias". 
The alias is only needed when a component is referenced elsewhere in the 
devfile (some command) or if two components of the same type use the 
same "identifying attribute" (e.g. two dockerimage components using the 
same dockerimage or 2 kubernetes components using the same referenced file).

Please update your devfiles and remove the "name", and replace it with 
"alias" if needed, from the components once Che 7.0.0-beta-4.0 is out.

Thanks,

Lukas