[morelisp]

Not just helm. There are probably a half dozen tools for rendering manifests in our company, only some use text/template, and they all suck. Text replacements are bad. Declarative structured patches are bad. Control flow in JSON is bad. We've had a language for dealing with generating complex nested structured data for years!

[ianburrell]

Have you seen Jsonnet, Dhall, and Cue? They are configuration language that are more limited than general purpose languages, more powerful that static, and designed for config files unlike templates.

[anonacct37]

text/template is probably ok... For some version of text. ditto with jinja and most templating languages. The cardinal sin of DevOps is using text macros to produce structured data. It only exists because unfortunately there is no other lowest common denominator for every config file syntax.

[morelisp]

Sure and that forgives its use in maybe, like, Salt and Ansible. Not in Kubernetes where everything is structured in the same way, even with API-available schemas, to begin with.