[HN Gopher] Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull ...
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       Terraform is currently not reviewing community pull requests
        
       Author : jaxxstorm
       Score  : 77 points
       Date   : 2021-09-05 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | shadycuz wrote:
       | Maybe they are desperate enough to hire me
        
         | mrtweetyhack wrote:
         | nobody's THAT desperate haha _jk_
        
       | danpalmer wrote:
       | 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 think that's very fair.
        
         | leetrout wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | jdavis703 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | mrtweetyhack wrote:
             | If you spent the time and effort to hunt down the problem
             | for them, the least they could do is look into it. repos
             | that don't care enough are a waste of time.
        
             | mwaitjmp wrote:
             | Out of interest then how do you proceed? Do you fork the
             | code and run your own patched version?
        
               | jdavis703 wrote:
               | Yes, just use our own forked version.
        
               | arthurcolle wrote:
               | 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.
        
         | benatkin wrote:
         | They don't happen to community projects like Node.js, Rust,
         | Vue, or Debian.
         | 
         | Perhaps this is apples and oranges, but I'm most interested in
         | open source projects that are governed by a foundation.
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | Community projects fall behind on PRs all the time. Many of
           | them are permanently behind.
           | 
           | Also, foundation != community.
        
       | braddeicide wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | devoutsalsa wrote:
         | Getting people to submit PRs that stand up to your requirements
         | can be a nontrivial exercise.
        
           | YorickPeterse wrote:
           | In addition, many people will only contribute once or twice.
           | The result is that you as a maintainer may need to invest a
           | lot of time, while the results are minimal.
        
         | Etheryte wrote:
         | There are no free lunches, pull requests are no exception. For
         | starters, before merging every pull request needs to be
         | reviewed at a minimum. That by itself can oftentimes be a very
         | time-consuming activity, especially if the changes are from
         | someone outside the circle of regular contributors. Outside of
         | fixes for typos and other trivialities, pull requests generally
         | require a lot of back and forth to get to a good state -- does
         | this change make sense architecturally, does it cover edge
         | cases, does it come with tests? Additionally, oftentimes pull
         | requests expand the scope of what you need to maintain, whether
         | you want to take on that permanent burden is a critical
         | question in and of itself. The list goes on. There are many
         | projects that do make it work, but make no mistake that this
         | takes a considerable amount of effort.
        
         | OJFord wrote:
         | Isn't a good review at least as hard as a good PR?
        
       | bawolff wrote:
       | I don't see anything wrong with that.
       | 
       | The beauty of open source is you can run your project however you
       | want: bazzar, cathedral, or something else. If people think its a
       | bad choice, they can fork.
        
       | lloydatkinson wrote:
       | Wow. Glad I started using ARM/Bicep for my recent learning about
       | devops.
        
         | dagss wrote:
         | 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
         | try to deploy in paralell, but oh, they touch the same parent
         | sources, so they crash with an error...
         | 
         | Then try to add depends_on in order to have it, perhaps, not
         | fail.
         | 
         | Or how about the Azure SQL feature where, if you block Azure
         | SQL to only AD logins, you'd have to declare an administrator
         | password on first ARM run (resource creation), then remove it
         | on subsequent ARM runs (resource update) because having it is
         | then prevented...
         | 
         | These aren't minor issue or glitches; it's symptomatic of a
         | system that's just built in the wrong way from ground up. ARM
         | isn't a stateless description of your resources, it's an
         | awkward scripting language (although since the APIs it
         | interacts with are idempotent the difference isn't obvious at
         | first).
         | 
         | How Microsoft could decide to have Bicep compile to ARM is
         | beyond me -- Azure has some good features (refer to resources
         | by name rather than allocated ID) that could greatly simplify
         | the approach that Terraform/Pulumi takes if they only targeted
         | Azure -- why didn't Microsoft do that instead, give us
         | Terraform/Pulumi for Azure without having to keep a statefile
         | (especially a statefile with secrets in it).
        
       | electroly wrote:
       | 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 users begging for it to be
       | merged. This has been ongoing for _years_. There is clearly a
       | priority problem here.
        
         | OJFord wrote:
         | (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
         | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-05 23:00 UTC)