I recently stumbled on the Ansible examples repo. It hasn’t really been maintained in a few years and would likely take a considerable effort to both revive it (aka review what’s there, fix/update as needed) and maintain it going forward (review/merge PRs, fix issues, etc).
I bring this up because it has a lot of stars/forks, and even though it hasn’t been maintained in years, it’s still getting issues and PRs open.
So I’m wondering in general what folks think about this repo and whether we as a community want to try taking it on.
Would be nice to figure out the repo original purpose. If it was used to refer to it from ansible-core documentation, it’s OK to have it there then and core has access to merge stuff and there’s no need to revive things.
If it was supposed to be used by anyone who want to share something, I think what people were posting there last time actively in mid 2020 was their subjective vision on solving some automation issues. Not sure if we should invest time in stuff we’ve no idea about quality and usefulness of. If people want to share something, they can write an article and refer to their own repos from those articles.
In my vision, the end source of truth should be good roles and collections/projects documentation (including examples) created by their communities and living in their repos and, resp, available on Galaxy or their docsites.
I tend to archive this. I guess most people would ask here in the forum or use the search engine of their choice to find Ansible examples, and there are enough around in blog posts and elsewhere to find this way.
I asked a couple of core folks and the thought was whomever was the original maintainer has gone for some time.
As for documentation - we link to this repo about a dozen times in different places in the docs, which may be why we still get issues and PRs created for it.
How about stopping linking (if there’s an open issue, i would take a look or volunteers are welcome) and archiving?
In places where it’s not possible/reasonable, we could move those examples on docs.ansible.com? If they are too large, i don’t know, maybe just remove those links then: it’s probably irrelevant anyway.
As Mario said, there’s a lot of content on the internet and the forum
I tried to update most of the examples. There are so many references in the internet that point to the official ansible-examples repo, like the offical docs
Maybe someone could review my PR and we can revive the examples repo?
Just pointing out that my comment was about the history of the repo and had nothing to do with ‘current’ maintainership or not and that your response to mine that it isn’t maintained was not pertinent.
Now back to the topic! What’s the plan with the Examples repo now? Cover all tracks and abandon the repo or maybe find a maintainer and update the examples? Personally, I think the repo is good as an extension of the documentation and as a kind of reference implementation. Especially the interaction of roles, plays and the inventory becomes much clearer with a complete example than the documentation of the individual components. It would also be perfectly fine to refer to other repos for certain topics, because there are very good examples there that are also maintained, but a few complete reference examples would be useful.
Either trim the existing repo down to ‘what someone can maintain’ or fork aspects of it where we do have maintainers.
or
give some recent contributors maintainer rights so they can review/merge PRs.
Basically, we don’t want to leave it unmaintained or else we have PRs like the ones listed here that look to be great additions, but no one is around to verify and merge them.
As it’s not gonna get fully supported (and even if they get by 1-2 people, it’ll be just someone’s personal perception - so it needs many maintainers for diversity of opinion), i’d avoid increasing fragmentation.
Interested folks can move specific parts to their own repos / related collections
I’m guessing steps to archive would be:
1 - Announce in bullhorn
2- Remove links to it from docs
3 - Update repo readme to say it’s archived and why
4 - Archive it a week or so after step 1
Thoughts @gundalow (as someone who was likely also around back when this was still an active repo).
The repo got archived in May 2024, as part of some housekeeping of older repos.
I’ve seen very little activity in that repo over my 8 years here. I love the idea of it, but without active maintainers and full end-to-end integration tests, it’s never going to be good enough.
It a group of people want to put together a proposal for how to keep it in a good state, we can transfer it to the ansible-community GitHub org.