Hi everyone,
As we start the 1.6 development branch more actively I wanted to share a few quick notes re: plans.
First off, we’re going to more aggressively merge LOTS of things for a while, in various themes and batches at least for the early part of the 1.6 cycle – but pare this down in the later half of this cycle. The reason for this in over the course of Ansible’s rise to being incredibly popular (yay!) we’ve been a bit too conservative for some time.
There may be no apparent rhyme or order to some of this, but there is. For instance, today we tackled lots of pull requests dealing with cloud items. In some cases, we left comments on quite a few of them requiring some changes, but most of them were mergeable straight.
Today, those efforts resulted in incorporated a lot of cloud feature pull requests and bugfix pull requests, as you can see in the changelog and commit history. If you encounter undesirable behavior as a result of these changes, please file a github ticket – your testing is quite welcome and useful.
Thus 1.6 already contains many new modules as a result of this push to attend to submitted PRs:
- packaging: cpanm
- packaging: portage
- system: debconf
- system: ufw
- system: locale_gen
- cloud: digital_ocean_domain
- cloud: digital_ocean_sshkey
- cloud: nova_group (security groups)
- cloud: nova_fip (floating IPs)
- cloud: rax_identity
- cloud: ec2_asg (configure autoscaling groups)
The result of increased merging rates will be that, as compared to in the past, the development branch may be slightly more bleeding edge than before, at least for a while in the 1.6 cycle. This is the tradeoff we make between balancing FREAKING ENORMOUS levels of awesome OSS contribution with the need of everyone to keep things ultra ultra ultra stable. Good, cheap, and fast, pick 3!
(Additionally we recognize we have some isolated things to correct on 1.5.X, and are still doing that. Details as they come)
We’re also going to focus on getting existing bugfix and feature enhancements of non-cloud types merged, which should address much of the existing open queue.
There is not going to be too many major “feature” themes for 1.6 though, as 1.5 was about pipelining and vault, but we’ll naturally consider things if they roll in. A lot of 1.6 will be devoted to expanding the integration tests – a major part of them added at the end of 1.5, in particular to cover things like ec2 and rax, and more modules in general.
The one thing we don’t have a lot of pull request for of course are bugfixes, so if anyone wants to attack any open bug reports, this is the MOST VALUABLE type of pull request we can ever get. If folks want to focus on bugfix pull requests vs feature pull requests, we will absolutely love you for it 
So, if you will, you can consider 1.6 to be basically “the people’s release” – getting things in that YOU want done (by way of pull requests and existing contribution) and increasing coverage of existing modules to allow future faster velocity in changes to those modules.
Wanted to let you know what we are doing!
Looking forward to getting a lot of new shiny things in and how things evolve. Thanks for all the help!
–Michael