Ansible 12.0.0 release schedule

[mariolenz]

@gotmax23

It would be good to hear from the netcommon and other network collection maintainers (I believe some of these are maintained by Partner Engineering?) on expected timelines

Do we have a group (or at least some people) we could ping about this here in the forum?

[gotmax23 (Maxwell G (He/They))]

Maybe @gundalow or someone on the Community Team would know who to ask?

[samccann (Sandra McCann)]

@anwesha has been keeping a conversation going with the internal networking team that maintains ansible.netcommon. They are keeping this forum thread updated.

Based on that, I think @KB-perByte is the most in the know on when these fixes will land.

[flowerysong]

@gotmax23

I don’t think we should delay the release of Ansible 12 indefinitely. Am I correct that the main blocker at this point is Core updates that are expected to be part of 2.19.1?

Releasing 12.0.0 GA with Core 2.19.1 to give the network collections a little more time is fine with me, but I don’t think waiting any longer is a good idea, especially considering the lifecycle of a single Ansible release is already relatively short (6 months).

I don’t really understand this point of view. Why would it be better to stabilize a broken release instead of waiting until known major issues are resolved? There’s no ticking clock here. People who don’t want to wait indefinitely and don’t care about the breakage already have the option of installing the prerelease.

[felixfontein]

As far as I’m aware the known major issue at this point is ansible.netcommon, which should be resolved with ansible-core 2.19.1 and a new ansible.netcommon release.

And I disagree that there’s no ticking clock here. There are users who are looking forward to use ansible with ansible-core 2.19 and newer collection releases. For example community.general 11 and community.crypto 3 are only included in Ansible 12, and you’ll never get the new features you’re waiting for by using Ansible 11.

(Besides that collections had many months of time to fix these issues. We explicitly asked all collections to ensure compatibility with ansible-core 2.19 at the end of April. Many apparently ignored this, in particular ansible.netcommon, which is why we now have these problems.)

[felixfontein]

I’m fine with waiting for ansible-core 2.19.1 and a new ansible.netcommon release that fixes the issues. I’m not OK with waiting longer than that. I’d rather think we should deprecate collections that still have major issues at that point so we can remove them from Ansible 13.

[shadeland (Tony B)]

@felixfontein

(Besides that collections had many months of time to fix these issues. We explicitly asked all collections to ensure compatibility with ansible-core 2.19 at the end of April. Many apparently ignored this, in particular ansible.netcommon, which is why we now have these problems.)

Who maintains netcommon? The issues were pointed out as far back as May.

[mariolenz]

I’m with @felixfontein there: Let’s wait for ansible-core 2.19.1 and hope that ansible.netcommon will release a new version that fixes all issues.

If they don’t, that’s probably hard on the networking community. But the netcommon maintainers have had more than enough time to fix things. Waiting longer would be unfair to ACP users who don’t use network collections, but can’t get current releases of the collections they do use. The networking community can pin Ansible 11 (which is still supported until Ansible 13).

Additionally, I think we should define a definite date that we’re prepared to wait. Otherwise, we might end up releasing 12.0.0 and 13.0.0rc1 a day later… and this would be somewhat weird, IMHO.

[felixfontein]

@shadeland

Who maintains netcommon? The issues were pointed out as far back as May.

According to Ansible 12.0.0 release schedule - #23 by samccann , Red Hat’s internal (Ansible) networking team.

[mariolenz]

According to 2.19.1 release schedule update, ETA for ansible-core 2.19.1 is August 25.

If I understand the discussion so far, the plan is to

1. Release a (last) beta August 26 announcing feature freeze
2. Release rc1 September 2
3. Release 12.0.0 September 9

Is this correct? And: Should we have a vote on this? I’m not saying we should have, I’m just asking.

And another question: Should we also publish a similar “Ansible Community Package 12.0.0 release schedule update” and mention it on Bullhorn, or at least mention this thread explicitly there? As far as I can see, it has been only mentioned casually in the 12.0.0b3 announcement.

And a third question: Will we do additional betas up until then?

Sorry for all those questions. But everything is a little bit unclear to me. My suggestion would be:

1. beta August 26, rc1 September 2, 12.0.0 September 9
2. do weekly betas on Ausgust 12 and 19
3. create a “Ansible Community Package 12.0.0 release schedule update” that should link to this thread and 2.19.1 release schedule update, and mention it on Bullhorn

What do you think?