Several collections have been deprecated by the Ansible Network team

[mariolenz]

This joins the following discussions:

• Unmaintained collection: frr.frr
• Unmaintained collection: openvswitch.openvswitch
• Unmaintained collection: vyos.vyos

The reason is that the situation for those three collections is the same. It’s probably easier to have the discussion about them in one place.

Important information on the deprecation:

@nilashishc

deprecated in December, 2023 and will reach end-of-life on December, 2025

So I thought to remove it from Ansible 13. But:

@nilashishc

We will continue to run ansible-test in CI for ansible-core<=2.17, >=2.15 and as such compatibility with ansible-core versions >2.17 will not be guaranteed.

So maybe we should remove it earlier. Not sure

[samccann (Sandra McCann)]

So they are testing against what is currently the core version in Ansible community package 11, and will not be tested for the core version for what will be Ansible community package 12. So yeah, feels like if it’s not breaking any rules, they should be deprecated asap so we can remove in Ansible community package 12.

[mariolenz]

It would help if @network-wg would make clear that they will not support ansible-core > 2.17. I think “compatibility with ansible-core versions >2.17 will not be guaranteed” is a little bit unclear.

[nilashishc (Nilashish Chakraborty)]

@mariolenz thank you for pointing it out! I’ve updated the README to be more specific.

[nilashishc (Nilashish Chakraborty)]

@samccann @mariolenz The Ansible Network team is okay with deprecating these collections from Ansible 11 and removing them in Ansible 12. Please let us know if there’s anything needed from our side. Thank you!

[felixfontein]

@samccann

So they are testing against what is currently the core version in Ansible community package 11, and will not be tested for the core version for what will be Ansible community package 12.

Ansible 10 is based on ansible-core 2.17, which the collections tests against. Ansible 11 will be based on ansible-core 2.18, which the collections do no longer test against, if I understood correctly.

[mariolenz]

@felixfontein

Ansible 11 will be based on ansible-core 2.18, which the collections do no longer test against, if I understood correctly.

Not only not tested against, those collections are not supported with ansible-core>2.17: current frr.frr README, openvswich.openvswitch README and vyos.vyos README

@nilashishc I’m not sure if this is really supported and would work, but maybe you should change requires_ansible: ">=2.9.10" in meta/runtime.yml to requires_ansible: ">=2.9.10,<2.18.0"

[nilashishc (Nilashish Chakraborty)]

@mariolenz

@nilashishc I’m not sure if this is really supported and would work, but maybe you should change requires_ansible: ">=2.9.10" in meta/runtime.yml to requires_ansible: ">=2.9.10,<2.18.0"

Thanks @mariolenz. That’s a good idea. I’ll update the runtime information.

[mariolenz]

It looks like meta/runtime.yml now states requires_ansible: ">=2.9.10,<2.18.0" for frr.frr and openvswitch.openvswitch, but not for vyos.vyos.

Is there a reason for this? Or is it just a question of finding the time to do it?

I don’t want to put any pressure on anyone, I just want to understand

[nilashishc (Nilashish Chakraborty)]

@mariolenz There’s a possibility of vyos.vyos being taken up by another set of maintainers. We’re currently in discussions regarding that. This is why I’ve not made the same meta/runtime.yml change in it.

[mariolenz]

I thought something like this might be the reason. Thanks for the info

[mariolenz]

Remove frr.frr and openvswitch.openvswitch

Let’s move the discussion about vyos.vyos back to Unmaintained collection: vyos.vyos