What should be installed by default with porter?

[carolynvs]

To assist with discoverability before with had the package index, we opted to install pretty much everything by default. Now that we have more mixins and some are either more stable, updated more often, and are cloud specific, I think it would be helpful to come up with guidelines for which mixins and plugins should be installed by default and which we should encourage people to use porter to install separately.

Reasons to limit what is installed by default:

• Increases the size of the default porter install.
• Increases the likelihood that something we ship could drift from porter and fail. We've seen it happen where the porter mixin framework is updated but something we ship by default wasn't and it caused the install script to throw an error.
• Avoid playing favorites with what is included and what isn't. Right now most of what is included are the ones created by the porter authors and what isn't shipped by default are the communities which we need to fix.

The only mixin that must be installed by default is the exec mixin. I would say that the mixins that we should stop installing by default are any cloud provider mixins (glcoud, aws, azure/az/arm). Anything that is installed by default will need to have a commitment to being maintained at the highest level of stability and stay up-to-date with each porter release similar to how exec does today.

After that the main question is are there any mixins or plugins that are so integral (like the exec mixin) that we believe that they should be installed by default vs installed at the discretion of the user? After looking over the list of current mixins/plugins I am inclined to say that they all can be installed as needed by the user.

🚨 We really need #975 to do this properly

[carolynvs]

We should consider doing this sooner because with the Helm2->3 switch installing helm2 by default really makes no sense anymore.

[vdice]

The only mixin that must be installed by default is the exec mixin

Agreed. I think this should be the only mixin installed by default.

After looking over the list of current mixins/plugins I am inclined to say that they all can be installed as needed by the user.

👍 Similarly, I don't think any plugins should be installed by default. (Of course, this assumes the built-in filesystem plugin remains)

[carolynvs]

Yeah the default plugins for storage and secrets are built into the porter binary. I'll submit a PR to just install porter + exec mixin and then update the documentation to make it clear you have to install the mixins yourself.