We typically try to avoid making subjective, boasty claims in our
documentation in recent times, but there remained both some older
documentation that we've not recently revised and also some newer examples
that are, in retrospect, also perhaps more "boasty" than they need to be.
We prefer not to use this sort of boasty language because not everyone
using Terraform has the same background and experience, and so what is
"easy" or "intuitive" to one person may not be so to another person, and
that should not suggest that the second person is in any way wrong or
inadequate.
In reviewing some of our use of the word "easy" here I tried as much as
possible to surgically revise the existing content without getting drawn
into a big rewrite, but in some cases the content was either pretty
unsalvageable (due to talking about obsolete features that were removed
long ago) or required some broader changes to make the result hopefully
still get the same facts across. In those cases I've both removed some
content entirely or adjusted larger paragraphs.
This was not an exhaustive review and so I'm sure there's still plenty of
room for similar improvements elsewhere. I also resisted the urge to
update some pages that contain outdated information about currently-active
features.
Previously we were using the experimental HCL 2 repository, but now we'll
shift over to the v2 import path within the main HCL repository as part of
actually releasing HCL 2.0 as stable.
This is a mechanical search/replace to the new import paths. It also
switches to the v2.0.0 release of HCL, which includes some new code that
Terraform didn't previously have but should not change any behavior that
matters for Terraform's purposes.
For the moment the experimental HCL2 repository is still an indirect
dependency via terraform-config-inspect, so it remains in our go.sum and
vendor directories for the moment. Because terraform-config-inspect uses
a much smaller subset of the HCL2 functionality, this does still manage
to prune the vendor directory a little. A subsequent release of
terraform-config-inspect should allow us to completely remove that old
repository in a future commit.
This commit is a wide-ranging set of edits to the pages under
/docs/configuration. Among other things, it
- Separates style conventions out into their own page.
- Separates type constraints and conversion info into their own page.
- Conflates similar complex types a little more freely, since the distinction is
only relevant when restricting inputs for a reusable module or resource.
- Clarifies several concepts that confused me during edits.
This rewrite of the "Configuration Syntax" page now gives some more detail
on the top-level structural constructs and de-emphasizes the name "HCL"
as subordinate to "the Terraform language".
It also now includes some commentary on valid identifiers and comments,
and issues around character encodings and line endings.
In addition, we now have a new "Expressions" page that replaces the old
"Interpolation Syntax" page, covering the expression language features
we inherit from HCL and how they behave in the context of Terraform.
The "Expressions" page currently links to a page about the built-in
functions which does not yet exist. This will be created in a later
commit.
Martin Atkins