Pulumi runs an import for every refresh, even when not necessary

[iwahbe]

What happened?

We observed in the service that running pulumi refresh triggered an import without cause.

Steps to reproduce

Run pulumi refresh with nothing to import. Observe that a refresh was silently triggered.

Expected Behavior

Pulumi only communicates an import state change during refresh when it needs to resolve pending creates.

Actual Behavior

An import is always run.

Output of pulumi about

Version 3.43.1

Additional context

We have this check, where importPendingCreates is of type *[]string.

pulumi/pkg/cmd/pulumi/refresh.go

Line 166 in a7cea59

if importPendingCreates != nil {

Testing confirms that cobra populates it here, even if nothing was passed:

pulumi/pkg/cmd/pulumi/refresh.go

Lines 306 to 308 in a7cea59

	importPendingCreates = cmd.PersistentFlags().StringArray(
	"import-pending-creates", nil,
	"A list of form [[URN ID]...] describing the provider IDs of pending creates")

We observe that importPendingCreates is never actually nil. It is instead &[] when nothing is passed.

Contributing

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