Environment variable to explicitly disable network features

[canardleteer]

One of the harder parts I've had in introducing folks to buf is teasing apart situations where they want to absorb all the remote features immediately (usually an open source case), and situations where they are not interested in sharing information about what they are working on with a third party (usually the corporate case) without knowing what they are getting into first.

How I've been working around that, is by using buf via docker --network none .... That's not a very good pattern for folks who hit an execution path where they didn't know they were using a feature that needed network access in the first place. They just see a "hostname not found" or "connection failed" error, with no reason why.

I would prefer it, if buf offered a way to explicitly exclude network enabled features, and provide a useful error message about why it needs network access in the first place (possibly with some information linking to a privacy policy), to perform the command it was asked to do.

It's a great strength of buf to be a strong tool that often "just works" transparently for people. Sometimes, how it "just works" transparently in an environment that prefers strong network isolation by default, doesn't work, and it should be a little more vocal about "how" it can or can't work under those conditions.

[bufdev]

It's a fair request. We'll go through this and see if this is feasible - it may be difficult to actually guarantee that the binary makes no network calls, and I'm not sure that half-measures are sufficient. We'll see what we can do.