For some time, the planning of Ansible Community package releases has been managed organically, with release managers volunteering ad-hoc within the #ansible-release-management channel.
As we approach the end of 2025, now it might be a time to move towards a more structured and predictable scheduling the releases in 2026.
The Proposal: A Community Release Calendar
Therefore I propose to create the Release Management Calendar to be hosted on the Ansible Community Forum. This calendar would serve two main purposes:
Improved Planning: It will allow us to effectively plan and schedule all Ansible Community package releases well in advance, reducing last-minute coordination efforts.
Recognition: It will provide an official place to recognize and credit the dedicated release managers who volunteer their time and effort to support the community.
Call to Action: Share Your Input
This transition requires community buy-in and input.
I request that the community shares its thoughts and opinions on this proposal in the comments below.
Specifically, we need to discuss:
Where is the best place to host and maintain this calendar?
What is the best way to handle manager sign-ups?
What key information should the calendar contain?
Your feedback is crucial to the successful execution of the release calendar.
ACP releases (mostly) follow ansible-core releases. So I suggest to have an ansible-core release calendar first. Or maybe create a combined one: ansible-core + ACP.
We have a prime example just this week. We were expecting new core releases on Monday so we can do new ACP releases on Tuesday. But there simply weren’t any. I had to ask in the chat and the answer was, more or less: Well, Thanksgiving (If there’s been some communication about the core release being delayed and I didn’t see it, I apologize and it’s completely my problem. But I don’t think this really speaks against my basic argument.)
Don’t get me wrong, I understand this and it’s OK to me. But it’s somewhat hard to communicate any definite release dates when ansible-core doesn’t.
I’m somewhat against having an ACP release calendar without an ansible-core one. I won’t object, though, if the general opinion is that having the one without the other makes sense. But ATM I somehow doubt that it does.
The core release schedule, for bugfix releases, runs on a 4 week cycle that is generally rather strict. The X.Y.0 major releases have their schedule published, and the goal is that the X.Y.0 GA lands on the 4 week cycle.
It’s totally my fault for lack of communication around this last release fwiw. I didn’t anticipate some things, and then just cut out for the holiday. However, I just kind of took it in stride, as it didn’t really impact any additional core releases, due to the standard December holiday release schedules (or lack thereof?), since the next core release will not land until Jan 26. fwiw, we’ve announced the December plans previous years, and indicated we would follow this plan in the future, so I did not announce any the fact that there would be no Dec 29 release.
In any case, our 4 week schedule can be defined as starting on Jan 26, 2026 and repeating every 4 weeks (with the rc1 of each being the week prior).
Instead of a calendar calendar, we could also have something similar to Releasing, Versioning and Deprecation · Issue #582 · ansible-collections/community.general · GitHub, which basically announces the next release dates (and which versions will get released). This could be organized as a community wiki post (is it possible to restrict editing to a certain group? that would be perfect), followed by a list of posts that have update information (we might want to restrict it to deviations from the standard schedule, i.e. like this week there would have been a post that the releases will be delayed for a week, and there can be posts around an X.0.0 release, depending on whether it gets delayed).
No problem there! You’ve cleared up the situation pretty quick in the chat and that’s fine for me . Even if you wouldn’t have we probably would have simply waited to get an answer.
But:
Yes, that’s just my point. Generally, ansible-core runs on a 4 week cycle. And so does the Ansible Community Package, generally.
So my suggestion is to simply stay with “generally every 4 weeks” for both, or have a release calendar for both.
I’m wondering what exactly the release calendar will fix/determine. Is it just the date of the release? Or is it also that we determine ahead of time who manages (and reviews) which release?
The latter is quite challenging for community members who don’t have a fixed working day where they can work on this, but have to do this in their spare time, whenever they have time on that day for it. On most release days I do find time eventually (sometimes when the release already has been completed by others, sometimes when it’s waiting for someone to pick it up again, and sometimes when nobody started the procedure yet), but it’s hard to say ahead of time (more than a few days usually) when exactly (and a bit further ahead of time, whether at all) I will have time on that day. So for me personally, the current “organic” way suites me well But then, I’m also fine with just being around as a backup in most cases, who can pick up doing a release spontaneously when the scheduled persons cannot do it for whatever reason.
One way to do this would be to create a release calendar sub-category of News and Announcements and a group for the release calendar and then restrict editing of posts in that category to the group members?
Call to Action: Share Your Input
(If there’s been some communication about the core release being delayed and I didn’t see it, I apologize and it’s completely my problem. But I don’t think this really speaks against my basic argument.)
. Even if you wouldn’t have we probably would have simply waited to get an answer.
But then, I’m also fine with just being around as a backup in most cases, who can pick up doing a release spontaneously when the scheduled persons cannot do it for whatever reason.