Move off asdf and fully adopt mise

Many projects within the GitLab Infrastructure area use asdf and .tool-versions for managing dependencies.

This project has been used for several years and has helped to standardise tool versions across the department.

Recently, some team members, including myself, have switched to rtx https://github.com/jdxcode/rtx as a faster and easier-to-use alternative.

rtx is backwards compatible with asdf but offers many advantages, particularly for speed. In particular, it continues to use the asdf plugin ecosystem.

The switchover has been seamless in my experience.

It also offers a "shorthand" feature which would be particularly useful for internal asdf plugins (we host several at GitLab).

Using rtx is a relatively straight-forward switchover, but migrating everyone to rtx would offer advantages and better DX.

Fuzzy Ranges

Many infrastructure teams use Renovate, and the struggle with noise from update MRs is real.

rtx allows us to use fuzzy ranges for non-production dependencies (developer tooling, such as shfmt, shellcheck, tflint, etc, possibly golang versions, etc). This would drastically reduce the noise from patch version updates on developer tooling.

Instead of specifying exact versions for these tools, we could specific <major>.<minor> and rtx will follow the latest patch release automatically.

asdf does not support fuzzy version ranges.

Proposal: Deprecate `asdf` and migrate projects to `rtx`.

This could be done in a few steps:

Make scripts/install-asdf-plugins.sh compatible with both rtx and asdf
Add a warning the asdf is deprecated
After some time, remove asdf support

rtx would offer much more straightforward operation and starting this migration at some point would improve DX for all SREs.

cc @reprazent @jarv @f_santos @pguinoiseau @cmiskell @sxuereb

Detailed Plan

Taken from !6293 (comment 1554604582)

I'd like to do this in a multi-phase process. Not all engineers using the projects that currently use ASDF are fully committed to switching to rtx and, to avoid disruption, I'd prefer to allow some gradual migration. Some people are still using ASDF and I want to avoid breaking their workflows unnecessarily until all stakeholders are ready.

I had intended to use the following steps:

Step 1: Allow the existing approach of scripts/install-asdf-plugins.sh to continue to be used, but allow rtx to be used instead of asdf (eg !6293 (merged))

Currently, plugin locations are defined in scripts/install-asdf-plugins.sh, not in rtx.toml and I'm trying to maintain compatibility during the migration, while avoiding the possibility of rtx users using a different configuration to asdf users.

Step 2: Update the documentation in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/common-ci-tasks/-/blob/main/docs/developer-setup.md to only recommend rtx, switch CI checks to rtx etc. As part of this step.

Announce to all stakeholders (across all relevant projects, not just runbooks) that they need to move over to rtx, and provide them with documentation from step 2 to help them migrate.

Progressively introduce .rtx.toml or other rtx-only features across all projects. At part of this, I would imagine that we would probably completely remove the scripts/install-asdf-plugins.sh script as rtx install would now be sufficient.

Instructions for Migrating your Local Developer Environment from `asdf` to `rtx`

Instructions are available here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/common-ci-tasks/-/blob/main/docs/developer-setup.md#step-31-uninstall-asdf-before-installing-rtx

Instructions for Migrating a Project from `asdf` to `rtx`

asdf Plugins are compatible from rtx so no need to change.
If the project is using the Infrastructure Copier Template (gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/common-template-copier/), run copier update in the project to update to the latest template, and checkin the changes
For other projects, check the scripts and documentation for the project, and fix any direct references to asdf

Projects

Generate Project List


glab api --paginate 'groups/1112072/search?scope=blobs&search=asdf -GL_ASDF'|jq -r '.[]|.project_id'|sort -u > projects.txt
glab api --paginate 'projects/gitlab-com%2frunbooks/issues/134/related_merge_requests' > mrs.json
for i in $(cat projects.txt); do mrs=$(cat mrs.json|jq -r --argjson project $i '[.[]|select(.project_id == $project)|.web_url]|join(" ")'); glab api "projects/$i"|jq -r --arg mrs "$mrs" 'if .archived ==false then if $mrs == "" then "1. [ ] \(.web_url)" else "1. [x] \(.web_url) - \($mrs)" end else empty end'; done

Edited Oct 25, 2023 by Andrew Newdigate