The "acceptable hashes" for a package is a set of hashes that the upstream
source considers to be good hashes for checking whether future installs
of the same provider version are considered to match this one.
Because the acceptable hashes are a package authentication concern and
they already need to be known (at least in part) to implement the
authenticators, here we add AcceptableHashes as an optional extra method
that an authenticator can implement.
Because these are hashes chosen by the upstream system, the caller must
make its own determination about their trustworthiness. The result of
authentication is likely to be an input to that, for example by
distrusting hashes produced by an authenticator that succeeds but doesn't
report having validated anything.
We previously had this just stubbed out because it was a stretch goal for
the v0.13.0 release and it ultimately didn't make it in.
Here we fill out the existing stub -- with a minor change to its interface
so it can access credentials -- with a client implementation that is
compatible with the directory structure produced by the
"terraform providers mirror" subcommand, were the result to be published
on a static file server.
Martin Atkins