`deck file render` canonical order

[mheap]

When deck file render runs, the output file is not deterministically ordered. This causes issues when customers run git diff.

We hit a similar problem internally with our openapi tooling (and solve it with https://github.com/thim81/openapi-format).

Acceptance Criteria

• Running deck file render multiple times results in the same output (checked by running cat output.yaml | sha246sum

[Tieske]

I think this should be a separate command; eg. deck file canonicalize, and possibly should be added as flags to any other command where it makes sense, eg. deck file xxxxxx --canonicalize or deck gateway dump --canonicalize.

[mheap]

What benefits are there to making this optional and not setting it as the default?

[Tieske]

canonicalizing would rewrite files structure, causing big changes. Not sure everyone would like that. Could even break peoples workflows, e.g. a linter step, if entities get moved around.

to explain; every entity would have only one location in the canonicalized output (top-level probably?). Where currently they can live in many places, at the discretion of the user. E.g.; a plugin can be on top-level, or under users, routes, services, consumer-groups.

[mheap]

Ah, interesting. I view canonicalization as ordering, not structure changes. If you put plugins under a service, they would stay there. But plugins would always be ordered after host in the service definition.

So this issue is not canonicalization as such, but format order

[Tieske]

Ah, that explains it. It would be a big step towards canonicalization as well, since the hard problems are in deterministic ordering anyway. Canonicalization would only add that each entity can only live in 1 specific location in the file.

[Tieske]

🎉