By observing the sorts of questions people ask in the community, and the
ways they ask them, we've inferred that various different people have been
confused by Terraform reporting that a value won't be known until apply
or that a value is sensitive as part of an error message when that message
doesn't actually relate to the known-ness and sensitivity of any value.
Quite reasonably, someone who sees Terraform discussing an unfamiliar
concept like unknown values can assume that it must be somehow relevant to
the problem being discussed, and so in that sense Terraform's current
error messages are giving "too much information": information that isn't
actually helpful in understanding the problem being described, and in the
worst case is a distraction from understanding the problem being described.
With that in mind then, here we introduce an explicit annotation on
diagnostic objects that are directly talking about unknown values or
sensitive values, and then the diagnostic renderer will react to that to
avoid using the terminology "known only after apply" or "sensitive" in the
generated diagnostic annotations unless we're rendering a message that is
explicitly related to one of those topics.
This ends up being a bit of a cross-cutting concern because the code that
generates these diagnostics and the code that renders them are in separate
packages and are not directly aware of each other. With that in mind, the
logic for actually deciding for a particular diagnostic whether it's
flagged in one of these special ways lives inside the tfdiags package as
an intermediation point, which both the diagnostic generator (in the core
package) and the diagnostic renderer can both depend on.
HCL's diagnostic model now includes the idea of "extra information" which
works by attaching an initially-opaque interface value to each diagnostic
and then asking callers to type-assert against that value to sniff for
particular interfaces in order to discover additional machine-readable
context about a certain diagnostic message.
This commit echoes that idea into our tfdiags API, for now only for
diagnostics that are backed by an hcl.Diagnostic. All other implementations
of the diagnostic interface just always return nil, which means they never
carry any "extra information".
As is typical for our wrapping abstraction, we have here also a modified
copy of HCL's helper function for conveniently probing a diagnostic for
information of a particular type, designed to work with our diagnostic
interface instead of HCL's concrete diagnostic type.