Ansible is currently the most forked server automation project on GitHub, a measure of which that GitHub uses to track how many people are trying to contribute to the project – more or less – or were interested enough to save the code, and is also the most starred configuration management project.
As a result, we’re getting a LOT of pull requests lately.
I wanted to share a bit on this because it’s clear we’re not able to get to all of these the day – or even the month, they come in. We were doing pretty well at beating this down, but as we’re also trying to build Galaxy for you (release in a few weeks) and other things, there’s a lot going on. Lots of pull requests are feature related. We’re going to need to choose, from time to time, what to pay attention to. Rest assured, your stuff is still in queue.
As we look at a pull request, we don’t just hit the green button like many projects might do to instantly merge it. This would be completely reckless and we’re not going to just instantly let everything in. Never trust a busy project with an empty pull request queue, you might as well open commit access up to the world and write software on Wikipedia :).
We have to ask is the code well designed, is the interface simple, does it work, and then we have to test these things. Also, when we choose to work on one thing, we’re also choosing to not work on other things.
Because we’re a systems project, we also touch hundreds of external components. APIs change in these components. It may be said that “May You Live To Write A Popular Open Source Automation Solution” is a curse akin to “May You Live In Interesting Times”. So we’re running around a lot.
I’d ask that everyone remain patient with their pull requests, and we’ll get things in time.
Soon, Galaxy will be out, and we’ll be knocking the queue further back down into submission, and you’ll be more likely to see your things in.
Meanwhile, I’d encourage you to help each other more on IRC and the mailing list – time not spent asking repeated questions that are already in the docs, etc, can be spent adding more things that you want into Ansible and making it even better.
If you want to be maximally helpful, look for open bug tickets and fix those prior to submitting feature requests and new features for other modules – we’re very apt to be prioritizing those first and this will help us get to the feature request queue faster. For some reason, everyone wants to work on features because they are fun – but this is not the best approach for the good of all the users.
Thanks for understanding!