As a collection developer/maintainer
Features are removed without public discussion or known good reason
Latest developments
None that I know of. This wasn’t discussed at CfgMgmtCamp 2026.
Original text
This one is very specifically about attributes for role entrypoints (and a very personal one from me). The attribute feature allows to document a dynamic set of properties for modules, plugins, and role entrypoints in a uniform way (original proposal, implementation). Every attribute has a name, a description, and a supported value (full / partial / none / N/A) with optional details. This is extensively used in the ansible.builtin documentation, and to some lesser extend also in collection documentation.
(They are used for check mode, diff mode, action group support, to indicate returning of facts, and in some cases to document supported platforms in community.general, for example.)
When the attribute feature was introduced, it was explicitly implemented for modules, plugins, and role entrypoints. (Modules and plugins are handled by one code path, role entrypoints by another.)
Then, at some point, support for role entrypoints got simply removed as a by-product of implementing another feature. I created an issue that it got removed. The comment from Core was “I thought that was a typo, how are attributes being used in roles?”, despite roles being explicitly and separately (from modules and plugins) being implemented before. The Core team declared that implementing it has been a mistake / that it is an unexpected feature. At least they agreed to properly deprecate it before removal (PR to re-add). There has been no public discussion, the documentation working group (DaWGs) was not involved in this decision at all, and I still haven’t seen any valid argument for why this is an unwanted feature that should be removed.
I’m still using it and I will not stop using it just because the Core team thinks it shouldn’t be there. The reason why attributes are useful for plugins and modules also applies to role entrypoints.
Antsibull-docs will keep supporting it, and I encourage everyone to keep using it to improve role documentation.