railway config plan never converges — literal-valued env vars perpetually shown as "Update variable"

[danbuhler]

CLI version: 5.23.1

Summary

railway config plan perpetually reports env-var updates for variables whose declared value in .railway/railway.ts is byte-identical to the live value. Running railway config apply does not make the diff converge — the next plan reports the exact same set of changes. Only env vars set to literal strings are affected; vars declared with preserve() are correctly excluded.

Repro

1. Link a project/environment whose service has env vars set to known values.
2. In .railway/railway.ts, declare a service with env literals that exactly match the live values:

   service("backend", {
     // ...
     env: {
       SECRET_THING: preserve(),       // excluded from plan — correct
       NODE_ENV: "production",         // matches live exactly
       PORT: "3001",                   // matches live exactly
     },
   })

3. railway config plan → reports Update variable for NODE_ENV and PORT.
4. railway config apply.
5. railway config plan again → reports the same updates.

Actual

Plan: 0 to add, N to change, 0 to destroy
  + Update variable backend.NODE_ENV
    └ backend.NODE_ENV (preserve() → «hidden»)
  + Update variable backend.PORT
    └ backend.PORT (preserve() → «hidden»)
  ...

Every literal-valued var appears on every plan, forever. preserve() vars never appear.

Expected

A literal-valued var whose live value already matches the declaration should not appear in the plan, and the plan should converge to "up to date" after apply.

Notes

• 0 to add / 0 to destroy — nothing destructive; values verified identical to live before and after apply.
• The (preserve() → «hidden») rendering plus the never-converging behavior suggests the differ isn't reading back the current value to compare literal-valued vars, so it always re-proposes them.