Re: Packaging terraform?

I'll echo what Noah said. Backwards compatibility is maintained but new features and API's are constantly evolving and being added. The issue with any Cloud platform is that all API clients need to be updated frequently in order to maintain state with the current platform. Things like Terraform will therefore have frequent updates. Sometimes, maintaining a package update schedule (like every 3 months) is good enough however. This is the same problem we talked about in the Debian Cloud sprints as it relates to Cloud guest software such as cloud-init or the Linux guest daemon's for GCE or Azure.

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Zach

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 4:37 PM Noah Meyerhans <noahm@debian.org> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 10:03:32PM +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> I have to admit I don't know a lot about proprietary apis. But as for
> OpenStack, APIs are quite stable, and (almost?) always backward
> compatible thanks to API micro-versions and auto-discoverability. In
> fact, I haven't found yet an example of something that broke API
> backward compatibility.
>
> Do we see such breakage often in AWS / Azure / GCE? I'm amazed to read
> this, really. How come customers aren't complaining about this then?

No, AWS is extremely disciplined about maintaining backwards
compatibility. I imagine GCE and Azure are the same. The issue is that
new APIs are being added *all the time* by all the providers supported
by terraform. You could certainly package it, but IMO it's not really
worth including in stable because it would lag so far behind. Even
maintaining packages for unstable and stable-backports would amount to
running on a treadmill.

Consider the terraform AWS provider:
https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aws/releases
It has a release on a weekly basis. GCE and Azure are bi-weekly:
https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-google/releases
https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-azurerm/releases

I'm not at all opposed to having these packages easily available, but I
see it being a lot of work and a generally thankless job.

noah