Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests • Hacker News Board

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#111

Post by remram » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #73

geerlingguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has always been a weird quirk of GitHub. You can disable issues, boards, wikis, but pull requests cannot be toggled. It's a pain point for lots of projects: those closed to contributions, those which are not primarily code (issues-only), those that use a different platform for review (e.g. Gerrit), ...

Why does GitHub persist? It's not like forcing the feature enabled helps anyone. The maintainers will still not merge if they don't want to. There are bots in the marketplace that will close PRs with a message. GitLab has a toggle. Why is this so important to GitHub?

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#112

Post by katbyte » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

sockpuppet_12 wrote: post #107

void_mint wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So Terraform manages to become the recommended DevOps tool for most cloud providers It's not the recommended devops tool for any cloud provider. > and now they won't even accept PRs to improve and add features from the community? Random people writing code doesn't make that code valuable or of any sound quality. They have employees whose jobs it is to improve and add features to their software. > Clouds should be a…

>It's not the recommended devops tool for any cloud provider. What is the recommended devops tool for azure in your opinion?

for azure you have azcli, arm templates (their cloud formation), and terraform. They also have started? work on bicep which is a DSL to create arm templates. As for what they recommend i think that changes depending on the service/team you speak too.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#113

Post by jen20 » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #41

jen20 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I for one will not sign a CLA that allows proprietary relicensing Why the objection? For it to have a material effect, both (a) Hashicorp would need to take Terradorm proprietary within a few years while your use actively need updates, and (b) there would have to be no one else maintaining a fork based on the existing MPL2[3] code. They say[2] why they need a CLA, which doesn’t seem deceptive. From the CLA[1] “you…

Because the MPLv2 license grants all the rights I'm willing to part with. I don't see it as deceptive, just as unnecessary.

I would also not assign copyright to the FSF.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#114

Post by mgbmtl » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

loeg wrote: post #69

geerlingguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you are rejecting all PRs, that doesn't require skilled review -- a bot can do it.

A bot should do it. Because sometimes people throw a tantrum, so it's easier to just ignore a PR. Or a maintainer might post a quick reply, only to be bitten later on. I love and live by open source, but the drama can be exhausting.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#115

Post by kroltan » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #38

qbasic_forever wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are currently not reviewing or merging PRs, closing them to only later reopen or whatever is probably even more overhead.

I think if it is made clear "don't hold your breath" and someone decides to contribute anyway, well, it's only fair to wait.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#116

Post by nomoreplease » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #21

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…

Ya, but I’ve seen those same responses 4+ years ago. I had to give up on using it for a project years ago as they didn’t support some things and closed the PRs

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#117

Post by angelzen » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #98

watwut wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is such a thing as open source project with "pull requests welcome" in readme and whole elaborate "how to contribute" wiki chapter. Except when you follow that wiki to the T, it still ends up ignored because no one is reading pull requests. It is not that these contributions are going out of nowhere, from clueless people who dont realized maintainers dont want pull requests. Pretty often maintenners wanted pull…

This, big time. It's a matter of setting expectations. If you don't want PRs, don't make it seem like you want PRs.

Early in the project the maintainer(s) are super-excited of their new baby. Later on they burn out and move on to do different things. The PR guides are written in the first stage, while PRs get ignored in the latter.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#118

Post by resizeitplz » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

PetahNZ wrote: post #83

jasonkester wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can literally edit the file in github and submit a PR with a few clicks.

Every repo has different contribution rules and a one-off in one repo often just isn't worth the time to learn all the bespoke boxes that need to be checked. The work is there in the comments and if it's of value, someone more familiar can take it the last mile ... and codespaces _just_ came out generally. Could you edit online before that?

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#119

Post by throwaway09223 » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

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…

"It would be easy to say that this is a failure of open-source in some way"

I have seen far more commercial, closed source products go through similar staffing crunches. The difference is that the problems are hidden away behind misdirecting sales teams and so on.

I can't tell you how many times I've reached out to someone on the inside of a company to get a straight answer as to whether a product is being properly staffed and supported. Or, conversely, how many times I myself have had to decide to orphan some commercial, customer facing work to meet a goal with a higher priority.

In my experience, useful open source products are less likely to suffer from inadequate staffing than closed.

Re: Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests

#120

Post by heurisko » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

Jetrel wrote: post #66

Notanothertoo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're getting a lot of downvotes for a good reason. The opposite of this: "code is much harder to read than it is to write" is held up as a ten-commandments style law of programming. Here's why: When you write code, you as the author know exactly what it does, so you have exactly one copy of the code in your head. But as you read code, you repeatedly run into "forks", where you encounter something you aren't sure of…

I don't think the downvotes are for a good reason, as we are speaking within the context of PRs.

If you're the maintainer, then you already have knowledge of how the system works. The PR just has to fit into your mental map of how things should be.