As we add support for versioned providers, it's getting more complex to
track the dependencies of each module and of the configuration as a whole,
so this new package is intended to give us some room to model that
nicely as a building block for the various aspects of dependency
management.
This package is not responsible for *building* the dependency data
structure, since that requires knowledge of core Terraform and that would
create cyclic package dependencies. A later change will add some logic
in Terraform to create a Module tree based on the combination of a given
configuration and state, returning an instance of this package's Module
type.
The Module.PluginRequirements method flattens the provider-oriented
requirements into a set of plugin-oriented requirements (flattening any
provider aliases) giving us what we need to work with the plugin/discovery
package to find matching installed plugins.
Other later uses of this package will include selecting plugin archives
to auto-install from releases.hashicorp.com as part of "terraform init",
where the module-oriented level of abstraction here should be useful for
giving users good, specific feedback when constraints cannot be met.
A "reason" is tracked for each provider dependency with the intent that
this would later drive a UI for users to see and understand why a given
dependency is present, to aid in debugging sticky issues with
dependency resolution.
Kristin Laemmert