Due to the inprecision of our shimming from the legacy SDK type system to
the new Terraform Core type system, the legacy SDK produces a number of
inconsistencies that produce only minor quirky behavior or broken
edge-cases. To retain compatibility with those existing weird behaviors,
the legacy SDK opts out of our safety checks.
The intent here is to allow existing providers to continue to do their
previous unsafe behaviors for now, accepting that this will allow certain
quirky bugs from previous releases to persist, and then gradually migrate
away from the legacy SDK and remove this opt-out on a per-resource basis
over time.
As with the apply-time safety check opt-out, this is reserved only for
the legacy SDK and must not be used in any new SDK implementations. We
still include any inconsistencies as warnings in the logs as an aid to
anyone debugging weird behavior, so that they can see situations where
blame may be misplaced in the user-visible error messages.
The shim layer for the legacy SDK type system is not precise enough to
guarantee it will produce identical results between plan and apply. In
particular, values that are null during plan will often become zero-valued
during apply.
To avoid breaking those existing providers while still allowing us to
introduce this check in the future, we'll introduce a rather-hacky new
flag that allows the legacy SDK to signal that it is the legacy SDK and
thus disable the check.
Once we start phasing out the legacy SDK in favor of one that natively
understands our new type system, we can stop setting this flag and thus
get the additional safety of this check without breaking any
previously-released providers.
No other SDK is permitted to set this flag, and we will remove it if we
ever introduce protocol version 6 in future, assuming that any provider
supporting that protocol will always produce consistent results.
The main significant change here is that the package name for the proto
definition is "tfplugin5", which is important because this name is part
of the wire protocol for references to types defined in our package.
Along with that, we also move the generated package into "internal" to
make it explicit that importing the generated Go package from elsewhere is
not the right approach for externally-implemented SDKs, which should
instead vendor the proto definition they are using and generate their
own stubs to ensure that the wire protocol is the only hard dependency
between Terraform Core and plugins.
After this is merged, any provider binaries built against our
helper/schema package will need to be rebuilt so that they use the new
"tfplugin5" package name instead of "proto".
In a future commit we will include more elaborate and organized
documentation on how an external codebase might make use of our RPC
interface definition to implement an SDK, but the primary concern here
is to ensure we have the right wire package name before release.
Martin Atkins