We don't currently have any need for this information, but we're
propagating it out of helper/schema here pre-emptively so that once we
later have a use for it we will not need to rebuild the providers to gain
access to it.
The long-term expected use-case for this is to have Terraform Core use
static analysis techniques to trace the path of sensitive data through
interpolations so that intermediate results can be flagged as sensitive
too, but we have a lot more work to do before such a thing would actually
be possible.
As part of moving to the next-generation HCL implementation,
Terraform Core is getting its own representation of configuration schema
that is tailored for configuration-processing use-cases. The capabilities
of this are a subset of the helper/schema model primarily concerned with
the configuration structure and value types, leaving detailed validation
and defaults for helper/schema to still solve.
These new methods allow mechanical creation of a schema in the new Core
schema model from a schema expressed in the helper/schema model. This is
not yet used as of this commit, but will be used later to implement some
new ResourceProvider methods that will allow core to obtain the schema
for provider, resource and data source configuration while remaining
source-compatible with existing provider implementations.
Martin Atkins