fix(cli): deploy and destroy with --all option fail on apps with no top-level stacks

[go-to-k]

Fixes: #1003

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[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 87.98%. Comparing base (4813f35) to head (989cb78).

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #985      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   87.72%   87.98%   +0.26%     
==========================================
  Files          72       72              
  Lines       10077    10082       +5     
  Branches     1327     1335       +8     
==========================================
+ Hits         8840     8871      +31     
+ Misses       1212     1186      -26     
  Partials       25       25              

Flag	Coverage Δ
suite.unit	87.98% <100.00%> (+0.26%)	⬆️

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[rix0rrr]

I don't think this behavior is desirable or intuitive.

The constraints are:

• --all was introduced before Stages existed. When Stages were introduced, it would continue to select stacks only in the top-level assembly.
• Stages are intended to be deployed using a pipeline in the same application. For that use case, you don't really want to select them using cdk deploy.
• I think having a "sometimes cdk deploy deploys stacks in stages and sometimes not" kind of behavior will be extremely confusing.

I understand this might be desirable for your specific use case, but is your use case represenative?

As written on your issue,

$ cdk deploy '**' 

Should solve your particular problem exactly, and it's not that much more to type than --all.

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Don't get me wrong: I'm not against making changes here altogether. But I think it should be a co-operation between the CDK app and the CLI. Perhaps a Stack gets a new option that interplays with a new selection mechanism:

new Stack(this, 'SomeStack', {
  deployUsingCli: WITH_ALL_FLAG | ONLY_IF_EXPLICITLY_SELECTED | NEVER,
});

And then we set appropriate defaults to retain existing behavior.

I'm also not opposed to changing the documentation to better reflect actual behavior.

But as-is, I think changing this behavior in the CLI only will get too confusing.