Aws-cli: A plain tar.gz archive should be made available for downloading and packaging for Linux/*NIX

[morancj]

Please make a (signed, with checksums) .tar.gz or similar archive available for Linux/*NIX distributions instead of (or, at least, as well as) the command-line installer. I have several reasons for requesting this:

1. Maintenance of an installation script is error-prone and time-consuming.
2. Many distributions (or O/S) have different ways of packaging software for clean installation and removal. Package maintainers are the experts.
3. It avoids trouble with sudo pip, clobbering PyPI with download requests, large Docker images and the associated complexity of passing through user data from the host. A Docker image I built FROM ubuntu:18.04 was 185MB. The Arch package is 69MB.
4. Predicatable version installation. For example, the download URL returns 2.0.0dev3: a few days ago, it was giving 2.0.0dev2.
5. A clear view of dependencies: for example, the Ubuntu image mentioned previously needs groff and less persistently installed in order to use the help commands.

As an example, when packaging your code for Arch Linux, I've had to run operations like this:

package() {
  ./aws/install -i "${pkgdir}/opt/${pkgname}" -b "${pkgdir}/tmp"
  rm -fr "${pkgdir}/tmp"
  cd "${pkgdir}"
  mkdir -p "${pkgdir}/usr/bin"
  ln -s "/opt/${pkgname}/v2/current/bin/aws2" "${pkgdir}/usr/bin/aws2"
  ln -s "/opt/${pkgname}/v2/current/bin/aws2_completer" "${pkgdir}/usr/bin/aws2_completer"
  cd "${pkgdir}/opt/aws-cli-v2/v2"
  rm -fr "${pkgdir}/opt/aws-cli-v2/v2/current"
  ln -s "${pkgver}" "${pkgdir}/opt/aws-cli-v2/v2/current"
}

You can see how I have to remove your symlinks and re-create them in the fakeroot to get correct paths.

Please see similar arguments e.g. here and various other places around the WWW.

[morancj]

Largely for the purpose of illustrating this issue, I've put my Arch package source (forked from the AUR) and Dockerfile up on GitHub here.

[morancj]

This also references #4660, and relates to #3553, #4278, #4175, #4926, #4942.

[kyleknap]

Marking as a feature request. Creating a source distribution that will allow users to build the CLI v2 themselves is something want to do.