General MR

Summary

Switch back to Helm v3 legacy wait strategy.

n/a

With this release, Flux was upgraded using v2.8.6. Flux should be upgraded automatically if you are "fluxing the flux". If not, it should be upgraded before this release. This introduces significant compatibility and behavior changes for Helm v4, particularly from the v2.8.0 release. This includes Helm breaking changes and many Flux updates to support that, see Flux release notes for 2.8.x and the Helm controller v1.5.0 CHANGELOG for more details. This is happening well ahead of the Helm v3 EoL on November 11th 2026. Flux supports the 3 most recent minor versions, e.g. 2.6.x, 2.7.x, 2.8.x for the CLI or 1.3.x, 1.4.x, 1.5.x for the helm-controller, on a best-effort basis.

Some notable changes:

Wait strategy now defaults to poller which uses kstatus
- We are keeping legacy strategy on the umbrella in base to prevent BB from rolling back if any package fails, we will change this back to poller in the future
Post-renderers had significant changes and could be broken
Flux migration may be required
serverSideApply is now default which enforces strict schema validation during install/upgrade/rollback and changes how managed fields are handled, see k8s documentation for more information.

Things to check (non-exhaustive):

Validate umbrella switched to the legacy waitStrategy (HelmRelease.spec.waitStrategy=legacy)
Check Flux helm-controller events for wait/rollback changes during/after upgrade
Verify post-renderer workflows
Resolve field-management conflicts now that Flux is using SSA (e.g. manual edits could be reverted to Flux's source of truth)
Ensure your values meet strict schema validation

Please test these changes before rolling out to production, there may be significant breaking changes for your packages.

Edited May 28, 2026 by Andrew Shoell