Helm controller doesn't seem to support merging text into values.yaml as literals

[ntjn]

(I've been using Flux for almost a year now, stumbled upon a chart that introduced this cornercase.)

The problem I need to solve

The chart I want to manage by GitOps requires an attribute of values.yaml to be specified as text literal (I'll show what I mean by that). This data is sensitive, which I would normally merge from a secret or configmap. Let's assume we are using a configmap now.

Merging data with valuesFrom

Let p.yaml look like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: p
  namespace: p
data:
  p: |
  sensitive-information: whimsicality

And values.yaml like this:

q:
  r: null

Now I want to merge p (into q.r) with valuesFrom (HelmRelease CRD), and the merge renders the following values.yaml:

q:
  r:
    sensitive-information: whimsicality

However, what I want is merging the data as literal (it's not a yaml). So this would like as follows:

q:
  r: |
    sensitive-information: whimsicality

Helm CLI supports doing so with the --set-file flag, but the Helm controller doesn't.

Potential solution

Adding a new flag to the ValuesReference that indicates merging as literal.

Do you want to support that? If so, then I gladly come up with a solution.

[airtonix]

I'm seeing the opposite behaviour:

#3163

[ntjn]

I see, patch seems to solve the problem. Going to try this out.