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Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

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Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#21

Post by OJFord »

electroly wrote: post #14

Props to them for being honest, but it's still not a good look for Hashicorp. Their stewardship of Terraform leaves a lot to be desired. For years now I've watched Terraform PRs just wither on the vine. You get the impression that nobody is working on the AWS provider at all. Every PR to the AWS provider that I've ever cared about has taken years to be reviewed and merged despite lots of thumbs-ups and comments from…

(Minor contributor, perhaps major issue-opener-commenter speaking)

I have a lot of respect for the team personally (as in myself), though I do recognise what you say completely too. I just think there's a lot of focus on trying to do things right, and long-term-maintainably, that it often presents with a poor outlook or like there's a lack of interest.

@apparentlymart from OP in particular - I have no idea who he is in Hashicorp hierarchy, I just recognise him from GitHub - in particular is really excellent in responding to good issues and adding information along the lines of 'yes we want this but unfortunately XYZ so we're hoping PQR is going to make this easier but first we need to ABC so yes but sorry not a priority right now' sort of thing.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#22

Post by OJFord »

braddeicide wrote: post #10

Surely community patches are such a good return on investment they should be pulling devs off other areas to keep someone on reviewing public prs. I've always been confused by companies that aren't over the moon to spend minimal review time to get the benefit of hours of work by free employees.

Isn't a good review at least as hard as a good PR?

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#23

Post by Notanothertoo »

OJFord wrote: post #22
braddeicide wrote: post #10

Surely community patches are such a good return on investment they should be pulling devs off other areas to keep someone on reviewing public prs. I've always been confused by companies that aren't over the moon to spend minimal review time to get the benefit of hours of work by free employees.

Isn't a good review at least as hard as a good PR?

No, reading code is far easier than writing it. Either way both have go be done regardless of the author.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#24

Post by don-code »

jdavis703 wrote: post #17
mwaitjmp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest then how do you proceed? Do you fork the code and run your own patched version?

Yes, just use our own forked version.

I do this. I wish I didn't.

First of all, building a provider isn't straightforward. The best way I've found to do this is to wrap `terraform init`, and have it `docker run` a build process for a plugin version that never existed - then dumping the built provider into the `.terraform` directory for the project. It's prone to failure; new users of the Terraform project complain that the build eats 8GB of RAM and takes many minutes.

Second, providers are constantly changing, and it's not always possible to cleanly rebase a set of community changes on top of master. Part of the trouble with letting PRs wither on the vine is that they themselves become stale - in one case, the code still compiles, but the end result is completely wrong.

For what it's worth: my use case was needing to use Terraform with some more "unusual" features of CloudFront and ALBs. The 80% use case for support is great. There's a remaining 15% that's well implemented by unmerged PRs, and another 5% entirely that's completely unsuppored. I've kept it IaC by using the `null_resource` provisioner to shell out to the AWS CLI where absolutely necessary.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#25

Post by jen20 »

electroly wrote: post #14

Props to them for being honest, but it's still not a good look for Hashicorp. Their stewardship of Terraform leaves a lot to be desired. For years now I've watched Terraform PRs just wither on the vine. You get the impression that nobody is working on the AWS provider at all. Every PR to the AWS provider that I've ever cared about has taken years to be reviewed and merged despite lots of thumbs-ups and comments from…

A few years ago, there used to be community reviewers of pull requests to the AWS provider - indeed I reviewed dozens after leaving HashiCorp. My own access for this got removed in (IIRC) late 2018, and I’d assume this was across the board.

I don’t think it’s conceivable that any reasonable number of employees could satisfy the demand of maintaining the first-party provider set in the current form, without leveraging the community. However, I for one will not sign a CLA that allows proprietary relicensing, and I’d guess most people who could give meaningful reviews are in a similar boat, or already work on the provider teams.

However, I’m also not sure that there is a “priority problem” as such - most providers don’t make HashiCorp money from consumers or contributors, and employee time is better spent on products which contribute to a positive bottom line.

The Terraform Provider Registry has made it much more palatable to run a fork of any given provider than it was previously - I’d recommend doing so if you have functionality you need that hasn’t been integrated.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#26

Post by qbasic_forever »

leetrout wrote: post #6
danpalmer wrote: post #2

These things happen, props to Hashicorp for communicating about it. It would be easy to say that this is a failure of open-source in some way, but to do so would be unfair to the huge amount of work that companies put into tools like this, and the stewardship that they offer, both of which take a lot of time and money. If periods of low activity while teams change are the cost the community needs to pay for that, I t…

I had a conversation with my coworkers when I worked there about being upfront with folks that we wouldn't review or accept their PR and stop leaving people hanging (this was on the TFE provider). I'm glad this was added. I stand by my statement then and now: there is nothing worse than contributing to something open source and then have your PR completely ignored.

I don't understand why people think that just doing unsolicitied work and pressing a button means the people on the other side are obligated to spend time reviewing and integrating it. GitHub has weirdly unbalanced open source contributions with a heavier burden and burnout on maintainers.

Contributing to a project doesn't mean just slinging code and calling it good. Communicate--talk to the people maintaining the code. Ask them, hey I have an idea and want to add this feature/fix this bug/etc.--do you have bandwidth for that change? Mailing lists, discussion forums, chat rooms, e-mails, etc. are the place to sort this out, not snarky or even angrier and angrier replies to an unsolicited pull request that goes unreviewed.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#27

Post by topspin »

One of these days Hashicorp is going to cash in and one of the major cloud operators will own the lingua franca of cloud provisioning. Oracle, for instance, directs the cloud users to Terraform as its de facto first class provisioning tool. It works rather well BTW.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#28

Post by jen20 »

dagss wrote: post #4
lloydatkinson wrote: post #3

Wow. Glad I started using ARM/Bicep for my recent learning about devops.

ARM is a complete joke, and Bicep compiles down to ARM. (More details: ARM is simply a dumb script that says "do this, do that", it doesn't interact with your cloud resources in any smart way. As one example: You can download a template for an Azure SQL instance from the Azure portal. That template will then randomly fail to execute, because it contains two "configuration" child resources of Azure SQL, which ARM will…

This is only partly accurate, because it conflates ARM the CRUD API with ARM Templates. ARM’s CRUD API is used by Terraform’s AzureRM provider (I bootstrapped that provider in 2016).

I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for with regards to referencing by name rather than ID - names must be qualified with a resource group and so forth, and to actually unambiguously identify things, you’d need all components of the ID.

Bicep looks like a solution in search of a problem to me, though fortunately I haven’t had to spent more than about 5 minutes looking at it.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#29

Post by BurritoAlPastor »

electroly wrote: post #14

Props to them for being honest, but it's still not a good look for Hashicorp. Their stewardship of Terraform leaves a lot to be desired. For years now I've watched Terraform PRs just wither on the vine. You get the impression that nobody is working on the AWS provider at all. Every PR to the AWS provider that I've ever cared about has taken years to be reviewed and merged despite lots of thumbs-ups and comments from…

I really don't see how you can look at the changelogs for the weekly releases of the AWS provider and think that nobody's working on it. If you want to see what a neglected provider looks like, spend some time with the poor Vault provider, where I have a two-year-old bug report about a reproducible crash condition without so much as a reaction emoji on it.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#30

Post by zepolen »

Notanothertoo wrote: post #23
OJFord wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a good review at least as hard as a good PR?

No, reading code is far easier than writing it. Either way both have go be done regardless of the author.

Writing code is easy. Writing understandable, maintainable and documented code that is easy to read, is hard.
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