The short description of our commands (as shown in the main help output
from "terraform") was previously very inconsistent, using different
tense/mood for different commands. Some of the commands were also using
some terminology choices inconsistent with how we currently talk about
the related ideas in our documentation.
Here I've tried to add some consistency by first rewriting them all in
the imperative mood (except the ones that just are just subcommand
groupings), and tweaking some of the terminology to hopefully gel better
with how we present similar ideas in our recently-updated docs.
While working on this I inevitably spotted some similar inconsistencies
in the longer-form help output of some of the commands. I've not reviewed
all of these for consistency, but I did update some where the wording
was either left inconsstent with the short form changes I'd made or
where the prose stood out to me as particularly inconsistent with our
current usual documentation language style.
All of this is subjective, so I expect we'll continue to tweak these over
time as we continue to develop our documentation writing style based on
user questions and feedback.
This command is intended to help support situations where Terraform is
configured to use only local mirrors for provider installation and so the
normal "terraform init" flow would not have direct access to the official
package checksums published in the origin registry.
The intended workflow here is to use this command only when adding a new
provider or changing an existing provider's version in the configuration,
to augment the lock file with all of the checksums required to verify
the provider across a variety of different platforms. Once this command
has recorded all of the official checksums, future runs of
"terraform init" will verify that provider packages obtained from a local
mirror match with those upstream checksums.
Martin Atkins