State file not been updated. How so?

[mdaleo404]

At the company I work for, we recently upgraded OpenTofu to version 1.7.1 from 1.6.0.
We are accustomed to running an 'apply' after upgrading to a new version, even if there are no changes to apply, and we are used to seeing the remote state file showing an updated timestamp and the new 'version' in the JSON. In one specific environment we are not seeing the version or timestamp change, but others we are.
We noted in the upstream documentation that no longer actually even say to do an 'apply' even with no changes, as part of an upgrade, like it used to. Maybe this is related.

[RLRabinowitz]

Hey @mdaleo404 , this behaviour shouldn't have changed in OpenTofu. I wasn't able to reproduce this behaviour locally when upgrading from 1.6.0 to 1.7.1

Which backend are you using?

[mdaleo404]

AWS

[RLRabinowitz]

OK I've taken a deeper look. I do see that the behaviour here is different when you compare the local backend and an S3 backend. In the local backend, the state does get updated with the new tofu version. However, in the S3 backend, the state does not change at all

I took a look at the behaviour in Terraform, and seems like backends used to update the version of the binary in the state up until ~1.3.0, when the behaviour has changed to not update the state if there are no changes.

So seems like indeed as you wrote in the original comment here, that an apply isn't actually warranted when there are no changes to the configuration