Currently, the only official sandboxed way to install gcloud is to install the google-cloud-cli Snap package. Yet if you do this, you cannot use any of the additional components. For example, to configure GKE cluster access you need the gke-gcloud-auth-plugin component. Here's what happens if you try to install this using the Snap version of gcloud:
$ gcloud components install gke-gcloud-auth-plugin
ERROR: (gcloud.components.install) You cannot perform this action because this Google Cloud CLI installation is managed by an external package manager.
Please consider using a separate installation of the Google Cloud CLI created through the default mechanism described at: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/
Please consider just packaging all of these components together with the Snap package by default. I do not want to install the apt/dnf package gcloud just to get basic functionality to work. Among other issues, it forces any shell scripts we use to set up workstations to have a bunch of distro-specific code to handle using different package managers, adding repositories, setting up keys, etc. etc. whereas Snap requires none of that. This is an officially supported installation method so please bring it to feature parity with the others.
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