[jnsaff2]

Helm charts are a horrible example of text based templating.

You have YAML/JSON that k8s API wants, that is fed through helm which is fed through helmsman or whatever newer thing. There might be a layer or two of other templating around. Sometimes companies have built systems so developers/devops don't even have the ability to see what the final compiled version of the template is which is like the mother of all: "works on my laptop" problems.

It's super easy to break text based templating because of some space, tab, string escaping or whatever.

YAML makes it worse as there are lots of gotchas and different ways of doing. JSON, being quite verbose and inflexible at least has strong structure right in your face so it's a bit easier to figure out what went wrong.

With a proper programming language data structure you can be much better with verifying that the things you add or remove or iterate over will produce a valid result, much better refactoring and working as a team independently.

[arkh]

> Helm charts are a horrible example of text based templating.

Every time I see " | nindent whatever" I'm asking why the fuck the tool cannot manage indentation.

[kevincox]

And it breaks every time a variable gets a `:` inside of it and now you are producing invalid yaml everywhere you forgot to call `| toYaml`.

[adhamsalama]

I once got a nil pointer exception when I updated a helm chart. I wondered why the hell am I getting a nil pointer exception for updating a YAML file. After some investigation I found an issue on GitHub where the maintainers said the Go team says this is an intended behavior for some case in Go templates.

Wasn't fun.

[benatkin]

That isn't a typical nill/null exception, like in JavaScript, ruby, and python. That's in a language where a lot of values are non-nullable, and some of the ones that are have zero-values that can be used without getting a nil pointer exception. https://go.dev/tour/moretypes/12

So, there's a good chance was an error that was really unexpected and it's better to show the error than to risk producing bad output.

[smw]

Never read anything more true in my life!

[jq-r]

I’m not sure why nobody invented a way to dynamically update values.yaml based on what are writing in the template file. And maybe vice-versa. It would be such a time saver. Maybe someone did, but I didn’t find it yet.