Why the examples stop at N-2
Every example under example/ is rendered for a set of Kubernetes minor lines, and that set now has a floor: exampleMinorFloor in magefiles/pkg/gen/examples/tags.go, currently v1_35. The newest line and the two before it are rendered; anything older is not, for rke2, k3s, and upstream alike.
Before this, the floor was wherever thirdparty-src/pins.json happened to still pin, plus whatever was already committed – exampleTags adds every version directory it finds on disk to the set it renders, so a line stayed alive by having been rendered once. That is how v1_32 was still being re-rendered on every refresh, long after anybody would install it.
Why a floor at all, rather than letting the pins decide
An example is not just a version string. It is a set of components that have to work together: the distro build, the kubeadm-published OS packages, containerd, and – for the upstream examples – a CNI the package applies itself.
The CNI is what forces the question. A CNI release supports a handful of Kubernetes minors and says which ones: cilium e2e tests exactly four and states outright that “older Kubernetes versions not listed here do not have Cilium support” (Documentation/network/kubernetes/requirements.rst, in the cilium tree). Cilium 1.20 covers 1.33 through 1.36. So an upstream-cilium example rendered for 1.32 would carry a cilium that cilium does not claim works there – a package that builds, publishes, and installs, and then does not route pod traffic.
Pinning a CNI per minor line would answer that differently, and it was considered. It means a version map per CNI, a rendered cilium manifest per chart version, and a judgement call per line about which CNI release to trust – all to keep alive lines that Kubernetes itself no longer supports. N-2 matches what upstream Kubernetes supports, which is the same window the CNIs are tested against, so one floor covers both and there is no map to maintain.
Why moving it is two hand edits
The floor is a constant, and tags below it are dropped rather than rendered. What is already committed below the floor is not deleted by a render.
A generator that deleted a whole example tree because a pin moved would be doing something a reader of mage generate:examples has no reason to expect, and the thing it deleted is the one copy of a definition somebody may be installing from. Retired rke2 builds are pruned automatically (writeExample) and that is a different case: an rke2rN whose RPMs Rancher has already removed cannot be installed from at all, so keeping it only invites someone to try. A 1.34 example still installs fine. It is just outside what this repository carries.
So raising the floor is: edit the constant, and git rm the lines that fall below it. Anything missed shows up as a tree that stops changing, not as a tree that silently keeps claiming to be current.
What this cost
Three minor lines per flavor, deleted: example/*/v1_32, v1_33, v1_34, along with their thirdparty-src/<distro>/ source copies and their generated pkg/engineconfig/gen/<distro>/ packages. That is a breaking change for anyone pointing at one of those paths, and it is recoverable from git history rather than regenerable – the upstream artifacts those examples name are still published, so a checkout of the commit before this one renders them again.