Allow installation from remote manifests without downloading the bundle

[corneliusweig]

I find it annoying that I need to download the file bundle and the manifest when testing a krew-index PR. It could be much simpler, if krew would accept remote URIs for the manifest location and if krew would download the file bundle referenced in there. Is there a particular reason why krew must not do this?

Thinking further, krew should keep track of the manifest URIs if not coming from the krew index. On krew update, it should then also download new versions from those URIs and handle those just as any other plugin. This would then allow plugin authors to maintain their own krew manifest within the plugin repo with all the benefits of krew (easy install, updates).

WDYT?

[ahmetb]

You can easily do

--manifest <(curl url) --archive <(curl url)

We discussed this in early days and decided not to add more magic and rely on unix conventions. Maybe it’s worth documenting though.

[corneliusweig]

Well I would argue that the cmd-line hack is less practical. After all, you need to copy/paste two different urls, not just one:

--manifest <(curl manifest-url) --archive <(curl archive-url)

BTW, what do you think about the idea of keeping track of the manifest URLs so that they can be updated during krew update?

EDIT contrary to my statement above the --archive option was never necessary. This has always been sufficient:

--manifest <(curl manifest-url)

[ahmetb]

To test manifests in index repo, I have the refined-github extension, so I can click Copy to copy manifest file contents into clipboard, then I have this alias:

krew_install_clipboard="kubectl krew install --manifest <(pbpaste)"

so I just run krew_install_clipboard. That's just my personal workflow.

BTW, what do you think about the idea of keeping track of the manifest URLs so that they can be updated during krew update?

We shouldn't go down this path. One-off installations are meant only for dev/test. We provide the --manifest/--archive just to ease local development experience. Once we start supporting multiple indexes, I don't think there will be a real need for non-developers to use --manifest/--archive.

[corneliusweig]

But that's exactly the point: if the location of plugins is recorded, they are no longer one-off. In a way, this is the multiple indexes approach in the extreme, where every plugin manifest is maintained in its own repository.
In contrast to multiple indexes, this would allow plugin authors to benefit from easy krew installation (+updates) without the need to add the plugin to an index.

[ahmetb]

The only problem I see with that is it ends up creating two paths for obtaining manifests. One being a local git repo that’s refreshed directly/indirectly via krew update; another one that comes from a permalink/URL directly.

I think once we figure out #195 and #23, we can revisit this idea. Perhaps there will be a way to configure non-git indexes, and one could be a direct URL reference as you proposed here.

/priority awaiting-more-evidence

[corneliusweig]

@ahmetb's shell alias also works on Linux, for example with

kubectl krew install --manifest <(xclip -o)

Therefore, there's no need for such a feature.