I encountered a bug in 1.9.2, did some digging, and found that a fix had been merged into ‘devel’ more than 16 months ago. However, it has still not made it into a released version of ansible.
Snarkiness aside, the 2.0 release cycle is a bit of an anomaly. 2.0 changes quite a bit, so the time to release is pretty conservative. That your change got wrapped up into the 2.0 release is unfortunate, but not indicative of future release cycles. Prior to 2.0 the releases were more frequent, and critical bugs were pushed out in even more frequent minor releases.
That said, much of Ansible is designed so that bug fixes or enhancements can be made use of easily without waiting for an official release from Ansible.
Hey Joel, we went back to try and figure out what happened, and figured it out. This was actually only merged in on April 1st of this year, but was done on devel, so this went into what became the v1 directory of dead code - it was not cherry-picked to stable-1.9. We’re going ahead and correcting that now, so this patch will be included in 1.9.3-1, which we’re going to release today.