Yeah, but what is 'infrastructure as code'? For anyone not already in the know, this phrase doesn't mean "managing and provisioning data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools." (quote from Wikipedia), it just means nothing at all.

For anyone not already in the know, "data centers" doesn't mean "building in which reside metal electronic machines that are connected by wires to other such machines all over the world, transmitting and receiving messages to one another" (quote by me), it just means nothing at all.

There's a base level of knowledge of terms that's assumed on this forum. Sometimes we are below that level, and sometimes we are above it. If you encounter "infrastructure as code" tomorrow, you will not react to it the same way, since now it's no longer devoid of meaning for you.

I am sorry, but your last sentence is basically "humans learn".

And, in case you missed it, no one here is asking what IAC is, most everyone in this forum knows, we are saying it's not super-transparent for a random visitor to their website and a better "what is this project about" page mentioning data centers a bit more and "we forked Terraform" a couple times less would be an improvement.

Yeah, but what is a 'computer'? For anyone not already in the know, this term doesn't mean "a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically." (quote from Wikipedia), it just means nothing at all.

They already have a good description on the website, it's just hidden under Docs -> intro -> What is OpenTF?

And I don't get why it's hidden, but instead they tell the reader multiple times it's a fork of something else.

You funny.

Edit: I don't want to sound dismissive, so let me explain the difference. Anyone coming to the website will be using a computer of some kind, and even if they for some weird reason don't, the verb "compute" does give a hint at what a computer might be. None of this is true for "infrastructure-as-code".

The target audience for a IaC project is probably people who know what IaC is. Or even people who know what "infrastructure" and "code" are, separately.

But a person who knows what "infrastructure" is likely thinks of roads and power lines and sewage pipes. A "data center", which is what "infrastructure" roughly means in this case, isn't exactly the prototypical example of "infrastructure", or is it?

If that is the case, why does the upstream project website tell what it does?

Right now, most of its target audience already knows exactly what terraform is and why they're abandoning it, although I agree that pivoting to explaining independently of that is a good idea

True, I might have skimmed it. But even now that does not tell me much.

Best that I found was under Docs -> intro -> What is OpenTF?:

> OpenTF is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle

That could have been on the frontpage somewhere. Or in the github description.

I assumed it mean representing various infrastructure (load balancers, http servers, microservices, databases, etc and their interconnections) as resources that you can add relations to in a code description and then it could resolve those as code, if you add new resources (code), it can work out dependencies and therefore help coordinate and make sure you don't overlook some critical link (like version compatibility) as developers add to it. It seems to have provisioning for CI as well.