> if there was anything that would receive attention for Terraform, I figured it would surely be a pull request fixing the six-year-old, number-one-most-popular feature request on the issue tracker
Working on an open source project, I see a lot of popular feature requests that don't fit into the roadmap and aren't aligned with the design of the project.
It's sometimes very difficult to tactfully explain to folks that "your idea is not aligned with the vision" but I have gotten better at it over time. It still takes a lot of emotional energy to wind yourself up and explain the vision, even after doing it before. And sometimes it falls on deaf ears. That's why we write FAQ documents. But not every FAQ belongs in the FAQ document.
Some questions shouldn't even be asked, because they betray the misunderstanding of the asker and in doing so they may prompt a new chain of even deeper misunderstandings that can only be prevented by heading off directly at the pass and not even entertaining the notion.
Now I'm absolutely not saying this issue is one of those issues in so many words or less. I'm not a keeper of the vision for Hashi. But I am saying, as far as selection algorithms go, if you wanted to pick a PR that would be likely to get merged...
Well, sure, you could do much worse than:
> a pull request fixing the six-year-old, number-one-most-popular feature request on the issue tracker
But I am saying that understanding that this PR having gone un-merged for 6 years in spite of being submitted multiple times, might be a signal that this change is not aligned with the intended direction and that it probably won't be merged...
I mean, it could go either way, but accepting that it can go either way, and that includes the possibility that it doesn't turn out the way you hoped, is kinda table stakes when you're dealing with a project that has like a zillion users. I mean, you wrote that big gnarly regex script to solve the issue, didn't you? How many of those things do you think went into production based on the number of people impacted? I'd say thousands. How would you have felt if the next release broke your fixup script but didn't actually solve the issue? (It kinda reads like that's what happened, anyway, so I mean, how does it feel?)
I'm not saying I wouldn't write a 10 paragraph diatribe like this, but I am saying I understand the terseness of the reply. The alternative is falling on one's sword and I don't expect anyone to be doing that for my benefit, and IMHO neither should anyone expect that of any OSS maintainer or anyone else.