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[0.14] Update help text #26730

Merged
merged 6 commits into from
Oct 28, 2020
Merged

[0.14] Update help text #26730

merged 6 commits into from
Oct 28, 2020

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pselle
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@pselle pselle commented Oct 28, 2020

Backport of #26695

This is just a husk of a container command that has no nested commands
under it, so it isn't serving any purpose.
These are commands that either no longer do anything aside from emitting
an error message or are just backward-compatibility aliases for other
commands.

This generalizes our previous situation where we were specifically
hiding "internal-plugin", and does so in a way that fixes the
long-standing cosmetic bug that the column width in the help output was
chosen based on the hidden command "internal-plugin", which is
unfortunately also the longest command in our command set.
A long time ago we introduced this separation between "common commands"
and "all other commands", but over the intervening years we've not really
done a good job of classifying new commands we've added and so by default
most of them ended up being classified as "common".

In the interests of making this output more useful for those getting
started, this switches the two categories so that "Main commands" is now
the curated list, and "all other commands" is the bucket for everything
else.

The intent here is that the "main commands" are the ones users are likely
to try as part of their initial learning of Terraform, while the other
commands are for less common situations where the user is more likely to
learn about a specific command in some other context, like a tutorial
about a special situation.

The "main commands" are also now ordered by the sequence users will
typically run them in, rather than alphabetical order. That's a subjective
readability tradeoff, but I think as long as the list stays relatively
short (which it should) it's still relatively easy to scan and find a
particular command in the shortlist.
The short description of our commands (as shown in the main help output
from "terraform") was previously very inconsistent, using different
tense/mood for different commands. Some of the commands were also using
some terminology choices inconsistent with how we currently talk about
the related ideas in our documentation.

Here I've tried to add some consistency by first rewriting them all in
the imperative mood (except the ones that just are just subcommand
groupings), and tweaking some of the terminology to hopefully gel better
with how we present similar ideas in our recently-updated docs.

While working on this I inevitably spotted some similar inconsistencies
in the longer-form help output of some of the commands. I've not reviewed
all of these for consistency, but I did update some where the wording
was either left inconsstent with the short form changes I'd made or
where the prose stood out to me as particularly inconsistent with our
current usual documentation language style.

All of this is subjective, so I expect we'll continue to tweak these over
time as we continue to develop our documentation writing style based on
user questions and feedback.
This just reduces the amount of space between different elements on in the
main help output from four columns to two. The main motivation here was
to give some of the longer command descriptions a little more horizontal
breathing room, but subjectively I also find the tighter column gutters
easier to scan. Others may disagree, of course.
My initial motivation here was to update the example output from
Terraform's top-level help list to match recent updates in the layout
and language used.

However, while here I took the opportunity to update some dated language
that was not consistent with our modern documentation writing style,
in particular including a totally unnecessary and potentially-alienating
claim that Terraform is "very easy to use". Our modern writing style
discourages this sort of "boastful" language and encourages us to focus on
the facts at hand.
@pselle pselle force-pushed the pselle/help-text-0.14 branch from f6af66a to d053e91 Compare October 28, 2020 14:56
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codecov bot commented Oct 28, 2020

Codecov Report

Merging #26730 into v0.14 will decrease coverage by 0.02%.
The diff coverage is 16.30%.

Impacted Files Coverage Δ
command/apply.go 42.38% <0.00%> (-0.21%) ⬇️
command/console.go 37.25% <0.00%> (ø)
command/fmt.go 76.38% <0.00%> (ø)
command/get.go 40.00% <0.00%> (-3.25%) ⬇️
command/graph.go 43.75% <0.00%> (ø)
command/import.go 53.53% <0.00%> (ø)
command/init.go 62.72% <0.00%> (ø)
command/output.go 71.85% <0.00%> (ø)
command/plan.go 41.95% <0.00%> (ø)
command/providers.go 52.43% <0.00%> (ø)
... and 16 more

@pselle pselle merged commit f577cde into v0.14 Oct 28, 2020
@pselle pselle deleted the pselle/help-text-0.14 branch October 28, 2020 15:23
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ghost commented Nov 28, 2020

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

If you have found a problem that seems similar to this, please open a new issue and complete the issue template so we can capture all the details necessary to investigate further.

@ghost ghost locked as resolved and limited conversation to collaborators Nov 28, 2020
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2 participants