The documentation at https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/marketplace/installations/#installation-settings states “keep your installation locked if you want to guarantee safe upgrades,” which implies that upgrades can be unsafe if an installation is unlocked and changes are made. However, is there a known class of changes that can be made safely to an unlocked installation that may be overwritten by an upgrade, but will definitely not cause issues with the upgrade? (For example, I might speculate that modifications to a Workshop module might fall into such a class of “safe changes.”)
When an installation is upgraded, edits to the installation’s resources are lost. The most dangerous things to edit are those which may be depended on by other resources (both within the installation and other resources in Foundry).
For example, if you unlock an installation and change the name of a dataset column, any consumers of this column may stop functioning when an upgrade to the installation reverts the column’s name back.
In addition, changes like this may prevent successful upgrades, such as if a dataset build is required as part of the installation process. In these cases, the build (which is part of the installation job process) may fail because of a misaligned column name, meaning subsequent installation steps cannot execute.
An example of a ‘safe’ change could be renaming a section title in a Workshop module. Though, we still advise installed resources are not edited unless absolutely necessary, for installations that will be upgraded.