Ideas about how to improve installation process

[dfang]

I think the process to install a binary can split into this small pieces:

0. ask where to save, complete <shorthand_name> or / to github.com// and something else
1. get release information via api
2. filter: determine which asset to download (maybe collect user/repo, os, arch, filtered_asset for analytics)
3. download asset, (timeout, resumable download, skip download if file exists, and use proxy if GITHUB_PROXY env is set)
4. validate checksum ???
5. process downloaded asset (call extractors or just copy), smart guess which one is the executable
6. verify installation

for step 0: to hardcode or not hardcode default shorthands
for step 1: how about updating go-github to v53, as API v3 is stable and versioned. v4 GraphQL api need to authenticated first
for step 2: improve how to score a asset, no more prompt to choose, if the wrong one is chosen, no big deal,
for step 3: in some countries, GitHub is blocked, so how to improve this is significant to UX experience.
for step 4: many release how checksums.txt or else, just guess the file and download it and calculate the asset downloaded from step 3, and find it in txt, and provide BIN_SKIP_CHECKSUM to skip this
for step 5: the asset downloaded from step 3 maybe an archive, need to guess which is the binary we want. (we can exclude README、LICENSE、CHANGELOG etc)
for step 6: verify installation is successful by invoking binary with --help, if it fails, prompt user to submit an issue or try go install or cargo install? AFAIK, cosmtrek/air can't run on CentOS 8 because of GLIBC version, you need to switch to go install method.

and also, I think:

1. GitHub support is the top priority,
2. Maybe release canary/dev version of bin?
3. Less API Calls, it's easy to trigger rate limit when to install a lot, eg. use BrowserDownloadURL not URL to download a asset
4. Just Save file to disk /tmp/ or other cache folder, if it fails, user can extract it by himself/herself/xxxx.