apt module reporting changes when there are none

Archives Ansible Project
,
1

In my Git role on Galaxy, I have the following task to install certain packages on Debian hosts:

  • name: Ensure git’s dependencies are installed (Debian).
    apt: “pkg={{ item }} state=installed”
    with_items:
  • libcurl4-gnutls-dev
  • libexpat1-dev
  • gettext
  • libz-dev
  • libssl-dev
  • build-essential

This task always reports a change, even when no new packages are installed… below is the full output when running the playbook with -vvvv (you can see the full playbook run, twice, on an Ubuntu 12.04 host, over on Travis CI):


TASK: [ansible-role-git | Ensure git's dependencies are installed (Debian).] *** 

<localhost> REMOTE_MODULE apt pkg=libcurl4-gnutls-dev,libexpat1-dev,gettext,libz-dev,libssl-dev,build-essential state=installed

<localhost> EXEC ['/bin/sh', '-c', 'mkdir -p $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578 && chmod a+rx $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578 && echo $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578']

<localhost> PUT /tmp/tmpUu6LUb TO /home/travis/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578/apt

<localhost> EXEC /bin/sh -c 'sudo -k && sudo -H -S -p "[sudo via ansible, key=ptpgbfvujharlyicgqvfprtxbyzstkfo] password: " -u root /bin/sh -c '"'"'echo SUDO-SUCCESS-ptpgbfvujharlyicgqvfprtxbyzstkfo; LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 /usr/bin/python /home/travis/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578/apt; rm -rf /home/travis/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578/ >/dev/null 2>&1'"'"''

changed: [localhost] => (item=libcurl4-gnutls-dev,libexpat1-dev,gettext,libz-dev,libssl-dev,build-essential) => {"changed": true, "item": "libcurl4-gnutls-dev,libexpat1-dev,gettext,libz-dev,libssl-dev,build-essential", "stderr": "", "stdout": "Reading package lists...\nBuilding dependency tree...\nReading state information...\nzlib1g-dev is already the newest version.\nThe following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:\n  git-man rsync liberror-perl libgeos-3.2.2\nUse 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.\n0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 128 not upgraded.\n"}

Any ideas as to why Ansible would be setting “changed” to true for this? Nothing was upgraded/installed/removed… Other apt tasks seem to work just fine.

2

check if any of the packages is 'virtual’​

3

That was exactly the problem; the libz-dev package was causing the false ‘changed’ status.

$ aptitude search libz-dev
v libz-dev -
v libz-dev:i386 -

Thanks!

4

I've been looking at a good way to detect and prevent this, but end up with
circular dependencies, if you have an idea on how to make detection work
'correctly' I'm willing to code it.

5

Short of adding in some regular expressions to detect whether there were changes in the apt stdout, I’m not sure of a way that you could do this easily—and without introducing a host of other bugs :confused:

6

Perhaps there’s a log to tail?

7

both of those would require major refactoring of the code, it only tries to install if it already considers a change as needed.

Brian Coca

8

Timestamp the rpmdb… no, wait :slight_smile:

9

Did anybody find a solution to this, or was there an issue raised at all?

I think I might be experiencing this and would like to work around it if possible.