This is a temporary helper so that we can potentially ship the new
provider installer without making a breaking change by relying on the
old default namespace lookup API on the default registry to find a proper
FQN for a legacy provider provider address during installation.
If it's given a non-legacy provider address then it just returns the given
address verbatim, so any codepath using it will also correctly handle
explicit full provider addresses. This also means it will automatically
self-disable once we stop using addrs.NewLegacyProvider in the config
loader, because there will therefore no longer be any legacy provider
addresses in the config to resolve. (They'll be "default" provider
addresses instead, assumed to be under registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/* )
It's not decided yet whether we will actually introduce the new provider
in a minor release, but even if we don't this API function will likely be
useful for a hypothetical automatic upgrade tool to introduce explicit
full provider addresses into existing modules that currently rely on
the equivalent to this lookup in the current provider installer.
This is dead code for now, but my intent is that it would either be called
as part of new provider installation to produce an address suitable to
pass to Source.AvailableVersions, or it would be called from the
aforementioned hypothetical upgrade tool.
Whatever happens, these functions can be removed no later than one whole
major release after the new provider installer is introduced, when
everyone's had the opportunity to update their legacy unqualified
addresses.
This is an API stub for a component that will be added in a future commit
to support considering a number of different installation sources for each
provider. These will eventually be configurable in the CLI configuration,
allowing users to e.g. mirror certain providers within their own
infrastructure while still being able to go upstream for those that aren't
mirrored, or permit locally-mirrored providers only, etc.
Martin Atkins