Reporting individual packages under apt and with_items

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1

I’ve been testing the apt module and with_items to manage reasonably large (200+) sets of packages. It’s comfortably fast - the packages are iterated within the apt module as a single task - but I miss being able to see which individual packages were updated in a given playbook run.

Is there a way to report on this without having a separate task for each package?

Thanks,
Mark <><

2

I’m ok with the modules getting modifications to return this.

Something like an array of

{
installed: ,
upgraded: ,
removed:
}

etc ?

The yum module has a bit better output and we’d want to make strides to keep them the same while not breaking any existing playbooks that used registered values.

3

Sounds ideal, yes. I’d wondered about returning a list of tuples with status for each package, but your suggestion is more readable, reducing to empty lists when nothing changed.

I don’t think it’s possible (yet) to have a mixture of latest/absent/present states in a single call - with_items turns them into separate tasks. But that would be a nice feature in future too, so returning all three lists makes sense.

Thanks,
Mark <><