Standardize documentation around deletion_protection, deletion_policy, force_deletion, etc

[joe-a-t]

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Terraform Version & Provider Version(s)

• provider registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/google v6.11.0

Affected Resource(s)

• google_bigquery_table
• google_bigtable_instance
• google_bigtable_table
• google_container_cluster
• google_looker_instance
• google_project
• google_redis_cluster
• google_spanner_database
• google_sql_database
• google_sql_database_instance
• google_storage_bucket

Terraform Configuration

Debug Output

No response

Expected Behavior

Looking across all of these different docs pages linked below, there is a ton of overlap in deletion_protection, deletion_policy, prevent_destroy, force_destroy, etc. While I understand that many of these differences in the arguments are not unique to the Terraform provider and are dictated by a lack of standardization upstream in the Google APIs, I do think that the documentation and explanation on the Terraform provider docs pages should be far more standardized and clear about things like:

• which provide deletion protection on the Google API side of things vs just the internal Terraform provider side of things
• which types of resources are protected by this for items that have downstream resources, eg:
  • for buckets, needing to be forced to delete if they still contain objects
  • for looker, what are the types of nested resources that prevent deletion? Does it prevent deletion of anything associated with the looker instance or just certain resources like the instance itself?
• what the defaults are
• what true and false mean
• for the ones that have string values instead of bools, what the values mean
• etc

Actual Behavior

Right now, all of the above expectations are very inconsistent across the various resources. Some resources have great documentation and are really clear on all those fronts and others are extremely vague and hard to decipher.

Also, there are likely other resources with this same problem that I did not flag when opening this issue, my search was not comprehensive.

Steps to reproduce

1. Look at the provider documentation

Important Factoids

No response

References

• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/bigquery_table#deletion_protection-6
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/bigtable_instance#deletion_protection-1
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/bigtable_table#deletion_protection-3
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/container_cluster#deletion_protection-2
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/looker_instance#deletion_policy-1
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/google_project#deletion_policy-3
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/redis_cluster#deletion_protection_enabled-2
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/spanner_database#enable_drop_protection-1
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/spanner_database#deletion_protection-4
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/sql_database#deletion_policy-4
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/sql_database_instance#deletion_protection-2
• https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/storage_bucket#force_destroy-3

[joe-a-t]

Also possibly related once the documentation not being generated issue is fixed #20328