Our usual "ground rules" for mapping configschema to cty call for the
collection values representing nested block types to always be known and
non-null, using an empty collection to represent the absense of any blocks
of that type so that users can always safely use length(...) etc on them
without worrying about them sometimes being null.
However, due to some different behaviors in the legacy SDK we've allowed
it an exception to this rule which means that we can see unknown and null
collections in these positions in object values returned from provider
operations like PlanResourceChange and ApplyResourceChange when the legacy
SDK opt-out is activated.
As a consequence of this, we need to be mindful in our safety check
functions, like AssertObjectCompatible here, of tolerating these non-ideal
situations to allow the safety checks to complete. We run these checks
even when the provider requests an opt-out, because we want to note any
inconsistencies as WARNING level log lines to aid in debugging.
Since these error messages get printed in Terraform's output and we
encourage users to share them as part of bug reports, we should avoid
including sensitive information in them to reduce the risk of accidental
exposure.
Previously we were just asserting that the number of elements didn't grow
between planned and actual. We still can't precisely correlate elements in
sets with unknown values, but here we adapt some logic we added earlier
to config/hcl2shim to ensure that we can find a plausible correlation for
each element in each set to at least one element in the other set, and
thus catch more cases where set elements might vanish or appear between
plan and apply, for improved safety.
This will still generate false negatives in some cases where unknown
values are present due to having to assume correlation is intended
wherever it is possible, but we'll catch situations where the actual value
is obviously contrary to what was planned.
We need to check for the known-ness of the prior value before we check for
the null-ness of actual, because it's valid for an unknown value to become
a null.
We need to make the collection itself be a tuple or object rather than
list or map in this case, since otherwise all of the elements of the
collection are constrained to be of the same type and that isn't the
intent of a provider indicating that it accepts any type.
This function's goal is to ensure that the "final" plan value produced
by a provider during the apply step is always consistent with the known
parts of the planned value produced during the plan step.
Any error produced here indicates a bug in the provider.
Martin Atkins