helm-diff should just ignore unknown flags or have some switch to ignore them

[red8888]

This error is a nuisance Error: unknown flag: --create-namespace

Its not a huge deal but I think I should be able to pass the same command I pass to "upgrade" to helm-diff. I don't want to have to remember which switches it does and doesn't understand especially because I'm scripting this out. I want to have my helm upgrade command a string and just swap helm upgrade with helm diff

Maybe there could be a --ignore-unknown-flags switch or something?

[mumoshu]

@red8888 Hey! Thanks for the suggestion. Just took some time to think about this, but still not sure if that's really the right direction.

Wouldn't setting --ignore-unknown-flags hide real errors like you typed a wrong flag like --valus somefile.yaml?
How can we differentiate ignorable errors and real errors?

[mumoshu]

It turns out @johanfleury has kindly submitted a PR #243 for this before.
But my question still applies.

Can we instead hide the feature behind some envvar, like HELM_DIFF_IGNORE_UNKNOWN_FLAGS=1 helm diff ...?
Then I agree this is just a good addition to helm-diff.

[johanfleury]

My workflow (and yes, there’s an XKCD for that) is to use the search function of my shell to go back to a previous helm upgrade invocation and to add diff at the beginning.

Having to set and envvar or a flag will not make it better than the current situation and if it becomes popular to the point that mostly everyone uses it, then there’s no point in having it in the first place.

Another solution would be to match helm flags explicitly but ignore them.

[mumoshu]

Having to set and envvar or a flag will not make it better than the current situation and if it becomes popular to the point that mostly everyone uses it, then there’s no point in having it in the first place.

I don't get this. Forcing this feature does help your use-case a lot, but doesn't help me for example as I want helm-diff to complain when I passed wrong flags.

Can't you just export HELM_DIFF_IGNORE_UNKNOWN_FLAGS=1 so that you don't need to set it everytime you run helm-diff? You can even set it in e.g. your bash_profile, so that you can fully opt-in to enable this feature by default, while users like me not affected at all.

[tsterker]

Some thoughts:

1. Opt-in:
I agree that making this an implicit behavior could lead to confusion/bugs and I like the opt-in idea.

2. Hard-coded:
But maybe this could still be combined with what @johanfleury said:

Another solution would be to match helm flags explicitly but ignore them.

IMHO, it would make sense to explicitly ignore certain options directly in the plugin (e.g. I think the timeout option could be an obvious candidate to ignore?)

3. Opt-in (explicit):
An alternative approach (or rather addition?) could be to also allow explicitly setting options to ignore via environment variable (e.g. HELM_DIFF_IGNORE_FLAGS). This way there would be more fine-grained control instead of the all-or-nothing HELM_DIFF_IGNORE_UNKNOWN_FLAGS.

[mumoshu]

I like 3. Opt-in (explicit): the most as it is least invasive and it works on any flags current/future helm has!

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[tsterker]

@mumoshu Is there any plan to introduce a HELM_DIFF_IGNORE_FLAGS flag?

This could really simplify some scripts where I just want to drop a diff in front of my helm command for sanity checking/auditing before doing the real thing.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.