For users that have metered or slow internet connections it is annoying
to have Terraform constantly re-downloading the same files when they
initialize many separate directories.
To help such users, here we add an opt-in mechanism to use a local
directory as a read-through cache. When enabled, any plugin download will
be skipped if a suitable file already exists in the cache directory. If
the desired plugin isn't in the cache, it will be downloaded into the
cache for use next time.
This mechanism also serves to reduce total disk usage by allowing
plugin files to be shared between many configurations, as long as the
target system isn't Windows and supports either hardlinks or symlinks.
On Windows systems the plugin binaries use a .exe suffix, which we were
misparsing as part of either the "v" or "x" parts of the filename.
This fixes#15578.
For now this supports both our old and new directory layouts, so we can
preserve compatibility with existing configurations until a future major
release where support for the old paths will be removed.
Currently this allows both styles in all given directories, which means we
support more variants than we actually intend to but this is accepted to
keep the interface simple such that we can easily remove the legacy
exception later. The documentation will reflect only the subset of
path layouts that we actually intend to support.
Martin Atkins