CI problem that I don't understand

I’m running into a problem with the Zuul CI in community.vmware that I don’t understand at all. I’ve tried to document my findings here.

To make a long story short, it looks like a task has been skipped because hostvars | length >= 1 has been false, but although hostvars is still empty the task isn’t skipped anymore. At least, that’s how it looks to me. Help or hints would be much appreciated :smiley:

This is a result of Fix CVE-2024-11079 hostvars unsafe context (#84339) · ansible/ansible@2936b80 · GitHub (only present on stable branches for data tagging reasons); it looks like this logic change to include implicit localhost in some cases was intentional, but it’s not clear why it doesn’t also update __repr__ in the same way.