Hey all! I’m looking for some input on an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while and just started hacking on the past few days. I call it “Mistletoe”, and it’s yet another Kubernetes package manager, like Helm. I’m writing it due to some frustrations I’ve had with Helm in the past not supporting more complex cases.
I’m still in the early stages, so only the most trivial parts work, which is why I wanted feedback before I really put the gas on. The cliff’s notes are that it’s a Kubernetes package manager where the packages are WebAssembly modules that take input YAML strings and output Kubernetes resource YAML strings. It turns out that writing packages for it is pretty braindead simple, so I have high hopes, but please feel free to give me a reality check if I’m spouting nonsense.
So Helm never fell short for me as an end user. As far as that goes, it’s near-perfect.
Where it does fall short is as a package writer. A package in Helm is just Kubernetes YAML that’s templated in Golang templates. As such, it gets very hard to any logic beyond the most basic, and projects that get larger get very unwieldy.
Hmm, what’s your idea for the OCI image format, e.g., how would it work? That might be worth looking into, too.
OCI allows you to package arbitrary content in a docker image. In this case it would be a collection of k8s yaml files. Two main benefits of this approach are:
Flux already supports this and I other tools to follow.