Incorrect "Provider produced inconsistent final plan" error, changing CreateThenDelete to DeleteThenCreate.

[jbardin]

When a resource that is planned to be CreateThenDelete because of a forced created_before_destroy from another resource, but the create_before_destroy resource has no changes, the apply process is losing the CreateThenDelete portion of the plan.

For example:

resource "null_resource" "a" {
  triggers = {
    version = "1"
  }
}

resource "null_resource" "b" {
  depends_on = [null_resource.a]
  lifecycle {
    create_before_destroy = true
  }
}

Applying this once, and changing resource a's version will cause null_resource.a to produce an invalid plan:

Error: Provider produced inconsistent final plan

When expanding the plan for null_resource.a to include new values learned so
far during apply, provider "registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/null" changed the
planned action from CreateThenDelete to DeleteThenCreate.

This is a bug in the provider, which should be reported in the provider's own
issue tracker.

This is erroneously attributed to the provider, but there is nothing the provider can do to modify the plan action for individual resources

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

If you have found a problem that seems similar to this, please open a new issue and complete the issue template so we can capture all the details necessary to investigate further.