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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

Why should Hashicorp hand-hold "new Go engineers" through PRs? If you don't know how to swim, stay out of the deep end of the pool. If someone contributes a complete, tested, documented, useful PR, that would benefit the community at large, I suspect it would be treated with the respect it deserves. It's not on them to teach people the basics.

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If you take the time to write a PR for a project, chances are you have taken the time to read the contributing guide and have tried to submit a passing pull request. There are conventions that may apply to a massive code base, such as those on some of the big providers that not initially clear, so I think spending some time in ensure that you explain why they haven't had a PR merged is worthwhile. Sometimes a PR can be ignored completely.

I guess it depends on whether you want people to try and contribute to your project or whether you insta close the PR because they missed a semi colon, which it seems would be your approach.

Well, I would say in this case because it's fundamentally an "integration ecosystem" platform. The success of terraform is dependent on its deep support of cloud resources, across multiple cloud providers.

Also, this isn't a space they own. It is chock-full of established players (Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Chef).

Hashicorp thus has two choices: rapidly fix/implement requested improvements, or handhold to get as many participants in the ecosystem as possible.

Otherwise, TF will be a spark in the pan, superseded, or restricted to niches. Where I work it already is being relegated only to security groups and network resources, despite armies of stateless HTTP API servers in our microservice smorgasborg.

The real question is, why aren't the multi-hundred-billion-dollar cloud providers ponying up resources for these platforms, which really are the only way to force multiply and scale up on them?

Yeah, AWS would be well-served to own the provider themselves. Sure, they would prefer people use CloudFormation/CDK, but they still get vendor lock-in if they support Terraform. In fact, they'd probably get even more vendor lock-in. As it stands, the Terraform provider is full of annoying bugs. It's still very usable, but if you dive deep, especially with newer AWS services, you're in for some headaches.

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