[Vote closed on 2023-01-29] Maintain Ansible 9 for longer than 6 months

My apologies if I’m necroing a discussion, but I’m fairly new to the world of Ansible (light use for a couple of years, a bit more intensive this year) and I’m a bit concerned by the implications of the above. Maybe I don’t need to be, maybe I do.

I inventoried the systems I’m controlling with Ansible and at the moment I have some RHEL 7 systems and some RHEL 8 systems that will be out of support if Python 2.7 and 3.6 are dropped, and that’s it. I don’t care about the RHEL 7 ones because they are EOL and will be shut down around the time Ansible 10 will come out anyway, but the RHEL 8 systems are going to be around for some years.

My controller system can be kept up to date, but I don’t understand what the expected strategy is for people who need to control RHEL 8 systems in the future. Do we need to install Python 3.8 on targets manually? What if we need to install a new package? Do we need to keep an old version of Ansible around on our controllers indefinitely for compatibility? Or is the feeling that most things people want to do on RHEL 8 systems will probably continue to work, more or less, even if Python 3.6 is no longer officially supported? Should I switch those systems back to Puppet?

Sorry if some of those questions have obvious, non-worrying answers; as I said, I’m kind of new here so I am probably flailing a little and if someone wanted to enlighten me I’d be really obliged.