When a system-wide shared plugin cache is configured, we'll want to make
use of entries already in the shared cache when populating a local
(configuration-specific) cache.
This new method LinkFromOtherCache encapsulates the work of placing a link
from one cache to another. If possible it will create a symlink, therefore
retaining a key advantage of configuring a shared plugin cache, but
otherwise we'll do a deep copy of the package directory from one cache
to the other.
Our old provider installer would always skip trying to create symlinks on
Windows because Go standard library support for os.Symlink on Windows
was inconsistent in older versions. However, os.Symlink can now create
symlinks using a new API introduced in a Windows 10 update and cleanly
fail if symlink creation is impossible, so it's safe for us to just
try to create the symlink and react if that produces an error, just as we
used to do on non-Windows systems when possibly creating symlinks on
filesystems that cannot support them.
Historically our logic to handle discovering and installing providers has
been spread across several different packages. This package is intended
to become the home of all logic related to what is now called "provider
cache directories", which means directories on local disk where Terraform
caches providers in a form that is ready to run.
That includes both logic related to interrogating items already in a cache
(included in this commit) and logic related to inserting new items into
the cache from upstream provider sources (to follow in later commits).
These new codepaths are focused on providers and do not include other
plugin types (provisioners and credentials helpers), because providers are
the only plugin type that is represented by a heirarchical, decentralized
namespace and the only plugin type that has an auto-installation protocol
defined. The existing codepaths will remain to support the handling of
the other plugin types that require manual installation and that use only
a flat, locally-defined namespace.
Martin Atkins