spike: Comments in devfile.yaml not preserved when using Devfile library

[rm3l]

/kind bug

Which area this bug is related to?

/area library

What versions of software are you using?

Operating System:
Fedora 36

Go Pkg Version:

• Go 1.17.8
• Version of Devfile library used by odo: v1.2.1-0.20220602130922-85a4805bd59c

Bug Summary

Describe the bug:

odo commands (like odo add binding or odo remove binding commands) that edit the devfile.yaml file will save the Devfile without comments preserved.
A first investigation on the odo side led me to the Devfile library, which uses sigs.k8s.io/yaml, which in turn relies on JSON as an intermediate format to convert YAML to/from Go structs.

To Reproduce:
See the test cases added in the following repo: https://github.com/rm3l/devfile-lib-comment-preservation-issue.

To reproduce the issue using odo, see redhat-developer/odo#5789 (comment) instead.

Expected behavior

Comments are preserved. I think this is important as we want the Devfile to be the main source of truth in odo. So users that write ("carefully crafted") comments should have their comments always preserved.

Any logs, error output, screenshots etc? Provide the devfile that sees this bug, if applicable.

Additional context

• Might be related to the properties ordering issue reported in Devfile library used by odo rewrites properties in alphabetical order upon save/write rather than preserving original order upon read. #371
• Looks like all tools using sigs.k8s.io/yaml have the same issue with YAML serialization and deserialization. kubectl reportedly has a similar issue with commands that edit the kubeconfig file: kubectl config drops all comments from kubeconfig file kubernetes/kubectl#1262

Any workaround?
No workaround so far.

Suggestion on how to fix the bug
go-yaml v3 brought in comment handling, via a new Node representation that allows preserving comments near the data they describe.
So the recommended way to have comments preserved is via this Node representation, but I guess this will not allow consistent handling of both YAML and JSON.

As we discussed during a community call, other tools might need JSON handling as well.

[valaparthvi]

/title Comments in devfile.yaml and the order is not preserved when writing to Devfile using the library

[johnmcollier]

Converting issue to spike to investigate feasibility

[github-actions]

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