The ibm.spectrum_virtualize has been deprecated / renamed.
Since the new collection ibm.storage_virtualize is already part of the Ansible Community Package, I think we should discuss removing it. I suggest Ansible 11.
I think we should keep it longer, except if we want to break the user experience by removing the redirects as soon as possible.
No problem, I’m fine with removing it in Ansible 12. But I really think we should define a definite version to remove it.
I think we need a general discussion of how long to keep redirects for renamed collections around. I don’t think we should re-discuss it every time a collection is renamed.
For ibm.spectrum_virtualize, it was replaced by redirects to ibm.storage_virtualize in Ansible 10. So removing the collection from Ansible 12 would mean we keep the redirects for two major versions, which is ~one year.
Whether this is enough time depends on two factors:
- How often do our users upgrade to a new major version? (I hope every 6-12 months, so they don’t use an End of Life version. I’m not very sure that’s true though…)
- How expensive is it to keep the redirects? Generally that’s pretty cheap.
BTW, while checking out 2 I noticed that the latest release (2.0.0) of ibm.spectrum_virtualize does NOT contain redirects, and is a year old. The repository was bumped to 3.0.0 a year ago (see the linked PR above), but also that doesn’t contain deprecated redirects, and 3.0.0 apparently was never released.
That’s pretty bad, since we already announced that ibm.spectrum_virtualize will be replaced by deprecated redirects in Ansible 10 - which never happened.
Which also means that users of ibm.spectrum_virtualize have ZERO indication that it is deprecated right now, if they didn’t closely followed the changelog / porting guide of Ansible.