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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

#71

Post by purpleidea »

It's cool that they're being open about this, but I'd be curious to know if the situation was their own doing or not? For example, how many non-hashicorp employees are maintainers? Do they allow this? (I'm actually asking-- I don't know the answer.)

Open source is great, but a single SPOF in one company is becoming too much of an healthy norm. If you love your software, set it free. And if you're worried about people^W companies taking it proprietary and not giving back, then use copyleft.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#72

Post by steve_adams_86 »

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.

In my experience, getting a high quality PR that you’d want to maintain is exceedingly rare. Getting a community submission to that standard takes a lot of effort - sometimes more than if you just did it yourself.

On top of that, a lot of developers tend not to enjoy reviewing and massaging community PRs all day. They want to write code themselves, and they want it to be important code. Putting your team on review duty is a great way to make people feel like their role is low impact and unrewarding. Again, they’d rather write the code themselves.

I find it takes a lot of experience for developers to recognize the value, impact, and reach of indirect contributions like that, so it’s rare to have a team with enough people who will do a great job of reviewing, supporting, and maintaining quality community submissions. If you assign it to relatively inexperienced developers you’re likely to wind up getting a lot of things merged that shouldn’t be in a rapidly growing project that’s increasingly difficult to maintain.

It’s a hard problem to solve. But again, this is just my experience.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#73

Post by tonyedgecombe »

geerlingguy wrote: post #50
leetrout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are many projects where just doing that would be the equivalent of a full time position. Even saying no requires a skilled review.

It would be nice if you could turn off accepting pull requests whilst keeping the project alive.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#74

Post by Galanwe »

beaconstudios wrote: post #54
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…

There's a group called cloudposse who have a huge repository of their own terraform AWS plugins. I haven't had to use their plugins yet (I've been lucky so far in having found a way to do most of what I've wanted through the official provider) but their selection is pretty comprehensive: https://registry.terraform.io/search/modules?namespace=cloud... https://github.com/orgs/cloudposse/repositories?q=aws+terraf...

These guys are really really good. I've read a lot of their terraform code, it's top quality, well architectured. Definitely recommend to read their modules.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#75

Post by bostonsre »

whitepoplar wrote: post #68
bostonsre wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the second?

Datadog. I've used their products for years and I believe in their team. Picked most of what I have up after their ipo. Hashicorp is similar (but I haven't been a paying customer of theirs).

I'm a timid investor and am pretty nihilistic about tech in general. I forget the exact Charlie munger quote, but it was something about staying in your circle of competence.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#76

Post by mdaniel »

plorkyeran wrote: post #59
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.

My experience has been that the first-order ROI of community PRs is negative. PRs which do more than just fix a typo that you can just go "thanks" and merge are extremely rare. Most external PRs take more work to get into a good state than it would have been for us to fix the problem ourselves. The main reason to accept community PRs is because it helps you get passionate users, not because they're free labor.

> Most external PRs take more work to get into a good state than it would have been for us to fix the problem ourselves.

But, isn't that a strange comment to make on a thread where there was an announcement "sorry, we don't have bandwidth to even look at any problems that aren't on some PM's roadmap"

To tug on that a little more, community PRs (and issues, but I'm focused on the folks who want something to work bad enough to actually contribute a fix) are far more likely to be some edge case that a real user has stepped on which the core project either didn't consider, didn't test, or thinks "who would use the spacebar to heat their computer?"

One can get passionate anti-users, too, if they have their PRs thrown in the trash

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#77

Post by grobbie »

bostonsre wrote: post #40
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.

I'm assuming that there's a communications lockdown and freeze ahead of an IPO, and that extends even to reviewing pull requests. But I know jack and perhaps I'm just seeing ghosts.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#78

Post by jasonkester »

mwaitjmp wrote: post #15
jdavis703 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve made PRs because I need the change for my day job. By the time I’ve traced an issue down to a third party library the cost of making a PR is minimal. But if they don’t want to take the changes, it doesn’t bother me. Of course I don’t work on open source out of passion, so I could imagine this is different for the true believers.

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

Personally, I tend to post the change in a comment on the issue that it fixes. I don't generally bother with doing a formal PR, since that would mean setting up the repo in a dev environment, branching, etc. and would be a bunch of extra work.

Locally, I just make the change and check it in to my project.

Here's an example:

https://github.com/xwpongithub/vue-range-slider/issues/3#iss...

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#79

Post by dagss »

jen20 wrote: post #28
dagss wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmm, not sure how I am conflating things, I meant to just wrote about ARM templates full stop? The API I refer to is the Azure Management API (we ended up using that directly from Python instead of using ARM ourselves)...

I said that referencing by name is one of the few things that are good about Azure. It means one does not have to persist a lot of resource IDs when deploying infra, one can just query the cloud state.

What I am looking for -- or what I would love if someone built for me -- is utilizing that feature to deliver Terraform or Pulumi without the need for a statefile. The statefile should not be needed on Azure due to the resource naming scheme -- just query the management APIs to get currrent state.

When we looked at Terraform and Pulumi we saw that the tools by default sucked down evey secret in the resources into the statefile. This is behaviour I very much disagree with, we do not want secrets stored anywhere or pass through anywhere, we want to rely on service identity everywhere.

PS I am speculating here about why the statefile is needed...I have been assuming something about Amazon made it needed, but I may be wrong.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#80

Post by nikolay »

This is pretty sad as it has too much of a lost potential with the slow updates of the core. I've been waiting for dynamic providers (i.e. created via for_each, count, or dynamic), but they are not coming to Terraform anytime soon and the copypasta must go on. Some of the providers, which HashiCorp maintains are pretty behind. It used to be where people used Terraform for AWS, because CloudFormation was so behind, but nowadays it's the opposite story.
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