Avoid using https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pulumi/docs/master/data/versions.json

[justinvp]

Hello!

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Issue details

We're disabling a templates smoke test (https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/12693) because it typically fails because we kick off the tests for a specific new version of pulumi, but https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pulumi/docs/master/data/versions.json hasn't been updated yet.

Is it possible to reduce or remove our reliance on https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pulumi/docs/master/data/versions.json ?

A couple ideas:

• If a specific version is requested without any semver range operators, we should just try to use the specified version, rather than trying to check https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pulumi/docs/master/data/versions.json
• Instead of https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pulumi/docs/master/data/versions.json, can we call GitHub's API to look at public releases https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/releases

If we're able to address this, we should revert https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/12693

Affected area/feature

[simenandre]

I don't remember why we didn't want to use GitHub's API, but I know me and @stack72 talked about it.

Both ideas seem good!

If we end up removing versions.json, we should probably make a release for both v2 and v3, I know there are still users on both of those major versions.

[simenandre]

We dependant on the versions file https://github.com/simenandre/pulumi-config too, so there might be worth testing potential solutions out there before rolling it out here.