These are intended to make it easier to work with arbitrary data
structures whose shape might not be known statically, such as the result
of jsondecode(...) or yamldecode(...) of data from a separate system.
For example, in an object value which has attributes that may or may not
be set we can concisely provide a fallback value to use when the attribute
isn't set:
try(local.example.foo, "fallback-foo")
Using a "try to evaluate" model rather than explicit testing fits better
with the usual programming model of the Terraform language where values
are normally automatically converted to the necessary type where possible:
the given expression is subject to all of the same normal type conversions,
which avoids inadvertently creating a more restrictive evaluation model
as might happen if this were handled using checks like a hypothetical
isobject(...) function, etc.
This brings in the new HCL extension functions "try", "can", and
"convert", along with the underlying HCL and cty infrastructure that allow
them to work.
This also includes an upgrade to cty v1.1.1 because HCL calls for it.
The changes in these two libraries are mainly to codepaths that don't
directly affect Terraform, but including this upgrade will cause some
small improvements to Terraform's error messages for type conversion
problems.
Previously we were using the experimental HCL 2 repository, but now we'll
shift over to the v2 import path within the main HCL repository as part of
actually releasing HCL 2.0 as stable.
This is a mechanical search/replace to the new import paths. It also
switches to the v2.0.0 release of HCL, which includes some new code that
Terraform didn't previously have but should not change any behavior that
matters for Terraform's purposes.
For the moment the experimental HCL2 repository is still an indirect
dependency via terraform-config-inspect, so it remains in our go.sum and
vendor directories for the moment. Because terraform-config-inspect uses
a much smaller subset of the HCL2 functionality, this does still manage
to prune the vendor directory a little. A subsequent release of
terraform-config-inspect should allow us to completely remove that old
repository in a future commit.
Alisdair McDiarmid