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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

#31

Post by sneak »

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…

Seems like someone who cares about this open source project should fork it as the maintainer is obviously absent.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#32

Post by OJFord »

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.

What I mean is perhaps best summarised as 'reading and writing are both easy, but a good job of either is preceded by understanding, which is hard'.

So I start with them equal, but then I think understanding can be harder to ascertain from the PR than the initial investigation, or if the solution didn't follow the same lines as you might've chosen yourself.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#33

Post by encryptluks2 »

So Terraform manages to become the recommended DevOps tool for most cloud providers and now they won't even accept PRs to improve and add features from the community? I think there are greater issues here, first that we centralized around so few major providers instead of improving tooling to scale to any hosting provider and 2 that we let hosting providers create so much abstraction that each one requires an entirely different provider API. Clouds should be as simple as renting VMs or dedicated servers from hosting providers and having an image that automatically brings everything up for you.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#34

Post by terrathrowaway »

I commented, committed, worked with contributors and Hashicorp employees early on in Terraform. It was so refreshing to see a project that did what I wanted, but better than the tooling I'd already written -- and that it was so actively working with the community.

Phinze was a large part of feeling like my contributions were welcomed, even just as a community member. A few months back I encountered something of Paul's, noticed his GitHub work had tapered off and found the blog posts entitled "diagnosis" and "treatment" on his blog.

I know nothing more about current events pertaining to Hashicorp or Terraform, but seeing some negativity here coupled with the experience of encountering that sad news led me to comment.

That team has made world class tooling, with the community. The people I know who work there are some of the sharpest and kindest people I've ever met. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and I hope you yourself will as well before presuming anything that leads to more negativity.

It's obviously not ideal, but perhaps there are legitimate reasons and at least they were transparent.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#35

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

topspin wrote: post #27

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.

I've been very happy with Terraform. I also have a huge investment in Cloudformation and it doesn't take long to discover that Cloudformation isn't implemented consistently across services, it's full of bugs, and unless your bug happens to impact Amazon internally you can wait years for a fix. New functionality for existing resources can also take years to materialize. Back when I had an eight figure AWS budget they would offer to let me fund a Cloudformation fix (seriously! They wanted me to pay them to fix their errors) but since moving to a smaller shop they don't even offer that.

With Terraform (and its AWS provider) I've found things are generally implemented consistently, I've not encountered any crashing bugs yet, and all of the manual steps I've had to do with the AWS CLI have Terraform equivalents.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#36

Post by notatoad »

don-code wrote: post #24
jdavis703 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

heh. i've been considering a switch from ansible to terraform because i've been frustrated by ansible's limited support for some of the edge cases around ALBs. good to hear that terraform also sucks.

i'm gradually coming to the conclusion that all the tools that are supposed to make provisioning cloud infrastructure easier aren't as good as a bunch of crappy custom scripts using boto or aws-cli.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#37

Post by rad_gruchalski »

arthurcolle wrote: post #20
jdavis703 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just use our own forked version.

So then when your upstream repo diverges would you just rebase and manually add in anything you want from the forked development tree on the upstream side? Not sure what's best practice so... just curious how people have handled this - I usually leave my forks of stuff pretty stale and focus on my own little sub-pieces to achieve what I want but not too much else.

I usually have my own branch which can be used to get a diff and maintain the diff on any major code structure change. Most often there is not much hassle but can be annoying.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#38

Post by leetrout »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #26
leetrout wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

To be explicit: I agree.

But I still think it's basic decency to close the PR and tell them No. Or if you plan to leave it around make a comment to that effect.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#39

Post by larrybud »

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…

> How Microsoft could decide to have Bicep compile to ARM is beyond me

The reasoning is explained pretty well in the Bicep FAQ: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage...

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#40

Post by bostonsre »

topspin wrote: post #27

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.

Really hoping they go public. They are one of two tech companies I would invest in.
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