[Vote ended on 2024-01-17] Collection inclusion requirements: add requirements.txt and bindep.txt

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

@mariolenz

That said, I think even SHOULD would be too much. The ansible community package doesn’t need this EE stuff, so why make it a requirement (or a recommendation)?

That was my initial thought, but I was aiming for a compromise approach with SHOULD.

@cidrblock

• Documents the requirements for a given collection in a familiar way

I’ll note that we already require collections to document requirements within plugin DOCUMENTATION, but that’s

@cidrblock

• Helps with the build of a python virtual environment capable of using a collection
• Used within a CI pipeline to test ansible content using a collection and it’s [sic] requirements

Those three usecases are definitely valid, even if there’s other ways to address them. Thank you for bringing them up! I’m mainly hung up on the lack of direct benefit to users of the ansible package.

Regarding the last two points, we already strugle with collection maintainers running the required tests, so I’m not inclined to add a requirement for how they have to run them. Also, there’s the issue with runtime vs. testing dependencies. There should be a separation of concerns there, and asking maintainers to put a requirements.txt for test dependencies in the repo root doesn’t address that and doesn’t help with EEs which only need runtime dependencies.