Goreleaser config & tool updates

[olegbespalov]

What?

Currently, the latest goreleaser (v1.14.1) is failing on the check action (https://github.com/grafana/xk6/actions/runs/3985000350/jobs/6831849567) because our config is using the deprecated property.

At some point, it will be good to update the config (and all the required things) to use the new version.

    • DEPRECATED: `archives.replacements` should not be used anymore, check https://goreleaser.com/deprecations#archivesreplacements for more info

Why?

If the config will be up to date we could do updates at any point in the time (e.g. security fixes)

[imiric]

Can we consider dropping Goreleaser altogether?

We only use it because we inherited it from xcaddy, but we already use a decently stable release workflow in k6. Sure, it's not as neat as using a single tool, and the process is spread across a shell script and CI jobs, but it gives us the flexibility we need, to e.g. embed metadata in the Windows binary (which also might be possible with goreleaser?), or build DEB and RPM packages. Besides, we arguably don't need to publish FreeBSD, Linux PPC/S390x or 3 different ARM binaries. We can tweak the .goreleaser.yml to remove these, but I think we should just drop it and adopt k6's release process instead.

WDYT?

[olegbespalov]

I belive it's a good idea. We could quickly check with the team on our sync and rename the issue/change the description.

[imiric]

@olegbespalov At today's sync meeting, we decided to remove goreleaser without replacing it with k6's release process. The reasoning is because in order to use xk6 to build k6 binaries, users would already have to have the Go toolchain installed. So they can just install it with go install, and it's not much help providing pre-built binaries, and we can avoid the maintenance burden of this process.

We also mentioned that a bigger UX improvement would be to publish a Docker image with Go and xk6 pre-installed (#8), so we'll try to prioritize both tasks in the upcoming cycle. I know that @javaducky has created a Dockerfile for this in another repo, but don't think an image was ever published, so maybe that could be a good starting point.

I'll close this issue and create a new one to just remove goreleaser.