read-only telepresence version

[nicks]

Please describe your use case / problem.
I have a health-checking script that reports if a user has the right version of telepresence installed.

Currently, if you run telepresence version when no daemons are running locally, telepresence tries to automatically start the daemon with sudo. The user gets prompted for sudo.

This is confusing to a user who doesn't expect a version-checking script to start background daemons or require admin access.

$ telepresence version
An update of telepresence from version 2.13.1 to 2.13.2 is available. Please visit https://www.getambassador.io/docs/telepresence/latest/install/upgrade/ for more info.
Launching Telepresence Root Daemon
Need root privileges to run: /usr/local/bin/telepresence daemon-foreground /home/nick/.cache/telepresence/logs /home/nick/.config/telepresence

Describe the solution you'd like
Ideally, the default behavior of telepresence version wouldn't start up any new processes.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Alternatively, I'd be fine with telepresence version --read-only that worked this way.

Versions (please complete the following information)

Client         : v2.13.1
Root Daemon    : v2.13.1
User Daemon    : v2.13.1
Traffic Manager: not connected

Additional context
I have the same complaint about telepresence status

[cindymullins-dw]

Hi @nicks, the output we get is different, as below.
An update of telepresence from version 2.13.1 to 2.13.3 is available. Please visit https://www.getambassador.io/docs/telepresence/latest/install/upgrade/ for more info.
Client : v2.13.1
Root Daemon: not running
User Daemon: not running

Maybe the session was not quit and Telepresence took that command as a prompt to re-engage. Could you try running telepresence quit -s. That will stop it completely.

Telepresence status works the same way by the way.

[nicks]

Hi @cindymullins-dw ! Ah, I think I just realized what causes it. Try these repro steps:

telepresence quit -s
telepresence helm upgrade
telepresence version

My theory of what's happening is that telepresence gets into a weird state where the User Daemon is running but the Root Daemon is not, so telepresence version tries to start the root daemon.

[cindymullins-dw]

Thanks, @nicks, not sure this is truly a bug but could probably be improved.