provide method (env var or flag) to restore old locking behavior

[wyardley]

Current Terraform Version

Terraform v0.14.7

Use-cases

When directly pinning all versions already (as recommended by Hashicorp), and / or when using tools like Renovate to manage dependencies, the lockfile doesn't seem to add much, other than checking the hashes. While a user can ignore Hashicorp's suggestion to commit the lockfile, as we have, terraform will still create the lockfile locally, and complain if you try to run terraform init without --upgrade if the version changes. I get the reason behind creating the lockfiles, but IMO, it might have been nice to implement it a bit more slowly and / or with a bit more optionality.

While I suspect they (Renovate) will try, it's difficult for third party dependency managers to correctly and accurately keep lockfiles up to date for all tf lockfile versions that might exist in the future.

Having to explicitly run terraform init -upgrade to a version that's already explicitly requested (with ==) seems a bit excessive.

Attempted Solutions

using .gitignore to ignore lockfiles works to a point, but is still a hassle for local apply when versions get updated.

Proposal

Suggestions (this could be an either / or thing; happy to make a second feature request if it would help)
a) allow terraform init to automagically imply -upgrade when a version is explicitly requested
b) allow an env var or flag to ignore the lockfile completely and restore the old behavior of terraform init.

References

This comes out of some discussion in #27630
Renovate provider issue: renovatebot/renovate#7895

[wyardley]

Closing now that #31533 has happened, and also now that there are some discussions happening.

[github-actions]

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