The engine’s disable key does not gate a chart’s images

spec.config.engine.manifest.<chart>.enabled decides whether a chart’s images are exported and uploaded. .config.disable – the engine’s own key, which every example exposes as addons.disabled – decides whether the engine installs the chart at all. They are not wired together, and the asymmetry is visible to an operator:

So a cluster that disables cilium the documented way, addons.disabled: [rke2-cilium], still has all eleven cilium images exported to tarballs and pushed to every node. helmChartConfigs (types/distrocfg/rancher_common.go) consults both keys; Config.EnabledImages (api/colonel-byte.dev/v1alpha1/distro/chart.go) consults only enabled.

Why it was left

Wiring the disable list into EnabledImages is not a one-liner, and the reasons are worth writing down before someone decides it is:

• The normalization is not where it would be needed. disabledCharts handles a YAML list, a bare string, and surrounding whitespace, and it is unexported in types/distrocfg, which imports the distro API package. Reusing it from EnabledImages means moving it rather than calling it, and duplicating that parsing is how the two switches would drift in a second, quieter way.
• It would make the API package opinionated about an engine key. disable is rke2’s and k3s’s; manifest is already only read by those two distros, but Config.EnabledImages is on the shared type and upstream distros call it too.
• The right answer may be fewer switches rather than more plumbing. enabled arrived to gate images. If it becomes a real install switch – which a user-supplied Helm chart would need, since a disabled supplied chart should not be installed at all rather than merely have its images withheld – then one of the two keys should probably defer to the other rather than both being read everywhere.

What to decide

Whether enabled and disable stay two mechanisms or become one. Revisit alongside the user-supplied chart work, which is what forces the question: until then the cost is wasted upload for a chart disabled through addons.disabled, which is real but is no worse than the behaviour before per-chart images existed.

See package-values for what each key does today.