Right now, for inclusion into Ansible we mainly have the collection requirements (Ansible community package collections requirements — Ansible Community Documentation), which presents a lot of requirements, but doesn’t say anything about sizes of collections.
I’m writing this because of cisco.catalystcenter (successor to the deprecated cisco.dnac) · ansible-collections/ansible-inclusion · Discussion #88 · GitHub, which asks for including cisco.catalystcenter into the Ansible community package. The collection has a plugins/ directory size of 26 MB (community.general’s plugins/ is 11 MB for comparison), which includes 1052 action plugins and 1127 modules. It also includes a cvp/ folder (which would be included in the Ansible community package as well) that’s 103 MB in size, a roles/ folder of 93 MB, and 17 MB of tests/ (for comparison, community.general has 20 MB of tests/).
(Right now it seems to be next to impossible to run even the sanity tests on this collection. I guess this might have already been a problem with cisco.dnac…)
Including this collection would increase the size of the package considerably. The size of plugins/ and tests/ is similar to that of the cisco.dnac collection that we removed for Ansible 14.0.0, but that collection did not have such massive roles/ and cvp/ folders.
Also this collection is pretty specific: if you don’t administer Cisco CATALYST Center environments, it is basically dead weight to you.
I’m wondering whether we should be have more specific rules about general usefulness vs. size of collections for inclusion. I think it would be a bad idea to include such a huge collection which is only useful for a very specific group of users. Especially @SteeringCommittee, what do you think?