opentofu/experiments.go

package main

// experimentsAllowed can be set to any non-empty string using Go linker
// arguments in order to enable the use of experimental features for a
// particular Terraform build:
//     go install -ldflags="-X 'main.experimentsAllowed=yes'"
//
// By default this variable is initialized as empty, in which case
// experimental features are not available.
//
// The Terraform release process should arrange for this variable to be
// set for alpha releases and development snapshots, but _not_ for
// betas, release candidates, or final releases.
//
// (NOTE: Some experimental features predate the rule that experiments
// are available only for alpha/dev builds, and so intentionally do not
// make use of this setting to avoid retracting a previously-documented
// open experiment.)
var experimentsAllowed string

func ExperimentsAllowed() bool {
	return experimentsAllowed != ""
}
Experiments supported only in alpha/dev builds We originally introduced the idea of language experiments as a way to get early feedback on not-yet-proven feature ideas, ideally as part of the initial exploration of the solution space rather than only after a solution has become relatively clear. Unfortunately, our tradeoff of making them available in normal releases behind an explicit opt-in in order to make it easier to participate in the feedback process had the unintended side-effect of making it feel okay to use experiments in production and endure the warnings they generate. This in turn has made us reluctant to make use of the experiments feature lest experiments become de-facto production features which we then feel compelled to preserve even though we aren't yet ready to graduate them to stable features. In an attempt to tweak that compromise, here we make the availability of experiments _at all_ a build-time flag which will not be set by default, and therefore experiments will not be available in most release builds. The intent (not yet implemented in this PR) is for our release process to set this flag only when it knows it's building an alpha release or a development snapshot not destined for release at all, which will therefore allow us to still use the alpha releases as a vehicle for giving feedback participants access to a feature (without needing to install a Go toolchain) but will not encourage pretending that these features are production-ready before they graduate from experimental. Only language experiments have an explicit framework for dealing with them which outlives any particular experiment, so most of the changes here are to that generalized mechanism. However, the intent is that non-language experiments, such as experimental CLI commands, would also in future check Meta.AllowExperimentalFeatures and gate the use of those experiments too, so that we can be consistent that experimental features will never be available unless you explicitly choose to use an alpha release or a custom build from source code. Since there are already some experiments active at the time of this commit which were not previously subject to this restriction, we'll pragmatically leave those as exceptions that will remain generally available for now, and so this new approach will apply only to new experiments started in the future. Once those experiments have all concluded, we will be left with no more exceptions unless we explicitly choose to make an exception for some reason we've not imagined yet. It's important that we be able to write tests that rely on experiments either being available or not being available, so here we're using our typical approach of making "package main" deal with the global setting that applies to Terraform CLI executables while making the layers below all support fine-grain selection of this behavior so that tests with different needs can run concurrently without trampling on one another. As a compromise, the integration tests in the terraform package will run with experiments enabled _by default_ since we commonly need to exercise experiments in those tests, but they can selectively opt-out if they need to by overriding the loader setting back to false again. 2022-04-27 13:14:51 -05:00			`package main`

			`// experimentsAllowed can be set to any non-empty string using Go linker`
			`// arguments in order to enable the use of experimental features for a`
			`// particular Terraform build:`
			`// go install -ldflags="-X 'main.experimentsAllowed=yes'"`
			`//`
			`// By default this variable is initialized as empty, in which case`
			`// experimental features are not available.`
			`//`
			`// The Terraform release process should arrange for this variable to be`
			`// set for alpha releases and development snapshots, but _not_ for`
			`// betas, release candidates, or final releases.`
			`//`
			`// (NOTE: Some experimental features predate the rule that experiments`
			`// are available only for alpha/dev builds, and so intentionally do not`
			`// make use of this setting to avoid retracting a previously-documented`
			`// open experiment.)`
			`var experimentsAllowed string`

			`func ExperimentsAllowed() bool {`
			`return experimentsAllowed != ""`
			`}`