Packer 1.8.5 Released

[Wilken Rivera]

Hello Packer Community,

This release contains a number of improvements to Packer's HCL2 templating support, along with a welcomed fix to the external plugin installation commands. For a full list of changes please refer to the Packer CHANGELOG.

Notable Enhancements:

• The hcl2_upgrade command will now generate variable blocks for all input variables referenced within the JSON template being upgraded. This is particularly important for input variables that are referenced within the JSON template but defined within an external variable definitions file (*.pkrvars). Refer to Packer#12136 for more information
  
• The validate command has been updated to support a `-evaluate-datasources` flag that can be used to execute data sources at validation time. Data source execution is skipped at validation, which has been an area of confusion for users. Refer to Packer#12106 for more information.
• The setting of undeclared variables in a variable definitions file (*.pkrvars) will no longer throw an undeclared variable warning during build execution. Users wishing to preserve the existing behavior can use the `-warn-on-undeclared-var` CLI flag. Refer to Packer#12104 for more information.
  

Notable Fixes:

• The plugin installation commands such as `packer init` and `packer plugins install` will now try to fallback to a prior available plugin version if the latest available version is missing a checksum file or has been created with no release assets. Please note that Packer will only fallback to versions matching the version constraints defined within the required_plugins Packer block.
  
• For HCP Packer enabled builders, setting the argument keep_input_artifacts to false will no longer result in deleted images being tracked within the HCP Packer registry.

As always thank you for your continued support and contributions. 

The Packer team