Hi all,
We're happy to announce that the second alpha release of Ansible 6.0 is
now available for testing !
Ansible 6.0.0 will include ansible-core 2.13 as well as a curated set of
Ansible collections to provide a vast number of modules and plugins.
This is a major version update from Ansible 5.x which included
ansible-core 2.12 and there may be backwards incompatibilities in the
core playbook language.
Please see the porting guide (linked at the bottom) for details.
How to get it
Hi all,
We're happy to announce that the second alpha release of Ansible 6.0 is
now available for testing !Ansible 6.0.0 will include ansible-core 2.13 as well as a curated set of
Ansible collections to provide a vast number of modules and plugins.
I've mentioned before that I disagree with this language: The ansible
package does not include ansible-core, it lists a requirement for the
separately bundled ansible-core of the desired version. There may be
some model of an ansible suite that includes both, but the duplication
of the "ansible" name with what really a large bundle installed at
"ansible_collections" remains confusing.
In this case, the update and the dependency on a new ansiblle-core
creates a packaging problem. ansible-core 2.13 requires python modules
that are not available as RPMs in any RHEL release, even in the new
CentOS 9. It requires Jinja 3.0.3 or better,
I've been publishing RPM building tools for ansible and ansible-core
for a while now, but the dependency chain for this is too large
because the jinja2 update means a sphinx update, which is also not
available at all for python 3.8 on RHEL 8. It's only going to be
possible to pip install it on RHEL until, and unless, someone dees the
extra work to bundle a much updated jinja2 module with the whole
dependency stack, and messing with sphinx is begging for issues with
other packages.
I reported this on he git repo for ansible-core, the answer seemed
strange from Red Hat employees selling services for Red Hat owned
software like Ansible Tower and its freeware components, ansible and
ansible-core, to say " I'll quote:
It is the responsibilities of the distributions, and those who
maintain the packages to provide this functionality if they wish to
provide ansible-core packages. From an upstream perspective, the only
supported installation method going forward is pip via the packages
published to pypi.org.
This seems very strange since the recommended server for Ansible Tower
is RHEL 8, and the critical ansible developers are Red Hat employees.
Their company *is* the distributor of ansible, Ansible Tower, of RHEL,
and of CentOS. And relying on "pip install" is similar to the old
"cpan install" problem, and the "ant", "man","gradle", and "golang"
problem of not knowing which version of which components your
installation process may provide unless you do far more work than
writing packages in the first place.
Been there, done this, with old tools like subversion (that required
updated versions of SQLite) and numerous python and Java environments.
I've been happy to provide RPM packaging tools for RHEL users, but
ansible 6 and ansible-core 2.4.13 are more work than I can do for the
immediate future. I can publish an ansible 6 RPM builder that simply
lowers the ansible-core requirement, and probably shall just to have a
testable setupe.