Ask question only once

[henningWoehr]

Ask question only once

[debo]

I would like to chip in but with a different consideration suggestion but on a similar note.

I do believe that the default behaviour should be to just replay the previous answers unless otherwise specified in general. So basically instead of needing to be explicit with:

$ copier update --defaults

Making it implicit and possibly swap the behaviour for something like:

$ copier update --new-answers

What do people think? Or is there a specific technical reasoning as of why the current behaviour is the way it is?

[yajo]

@debo that's a different subject. I marked your comment as off-topic to keep the conversation focused. Feel free to open a new issue or discussion about that.

Back into the subject, it's not a trivial request. Adding support for this would require completely refactoring the logic of how and why we manage the state of the project, which is tailored to our use case.

The use case for copier as a tool is to let you provide new answers and make those answers change the resulting project. This thing you want fits more into a validation tool, such as a pre-commit hook, CI or linter, that forbids unwanted changes. After all, what if you do that change manually, without copier involved? You'd also delete the cluster resources...

However you can be creative. For example, you could deploy your manifests with kustomize, and set the name and namespace in a patch file. Then, add that file to _skip_if_exists and copier won't update it anymore.

If I don't want users to update values of a question, I'd just add a big warning in the question help.

Another option would be to use a validation based on a computed previous value. I haven't tested this but it could help:

old:
  type: str
  when: false
  default: '{{ resource_name|d("") }}'

resource_name:
  type: str
  help: What is the name for the resources which will be applied in k8s? (Can't be changed afterwards)
  answer_once: true
  default: container-registry
  validator: "{{not old or resource_name == old}}"

[yajo]

Closing because I think there's nothing we could or should do here, but please feel free to continue with the discussion. Thanks for reaching out!