When an operation fails, providers may return a null new value rather than
returning a partial state. In that case, we'd prefer to keep the old value
so that we stand the best chance of being able to retry on a subsequent
run.
Previously we were making an exception for the delete action, allowing
the result of that to be null even when an error is returned. In practice
that was a bad idea because it would cause Terraform to lose track of the
object even though it might not actually have been deleted.
Now we'll retain the old object even in the delete case. Providers can
still return partial new objects if they were able to partially complete
a delete operation, in which case we'll discard what we had before, but
if the result is null with errors then we'll assume the delete failed
entirely and so just keep the old state as-is, giving us the opportunity
to refresh it on the next run to see if anything actually happened after
all.
(This also includes a new resource in the test provider which isn't used
by the patch but was useful for some manual UX testing here, so I thought
I'd include it in case it's similarly useful in future, given how simple
its implementation is.)
Martin Atkins