Stuck between a bug and behaviour change

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Recently I became aware of this ’ Newer versions of Ansible don’t work with RHEL 8’
So I remained using ansible-core<2.17
But now I notice that i686 packages are not installed - ansible.builtin.dnf doesn’t install i686 packages #83406

So really my only choice, as I see it, is to drop support for RHEL 8. Does anyone know of another solution?

Thank you

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The fix [stable-2.16] dnf - arches must be the same in the is_newer_installed check (#83417) by mkrizek · Pull Request #83505 · ansible/ansible · GitHub was backported to 2.16

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If ansible-core<2.17 works, I’d stay on that.
It depends on your situation of course, but it may well be that a newer OS will cause a magnitude more work than a newer ansible version.
I tend to run a reasonably recent version of ansible, but ansible isn’t used at runtime, only to deploy a system.
So while currently EOL, I wouldn’t consider it a huge problem to use ansible-core 2.16 while I’m investigating/preparing an OS upgrade…

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So while currently EOL, I wouldn’t consider it a huge problem to use ansible-core 2.16 while I’m investigating/preparing an OS upgrade…

This is basically what it says at the bottom of https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/newer-versions-ansible-dont-work-rhel-8:

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@UNiXMIT To be specific, this fix should have been backported to 2.16.9. You may be using an older version, especially if you’re installing from AppStream instead of pip.

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That’s fantastic. I’ll check what version I’m using and update it accordingly. Thank you.

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Hmmm I’m running ansible-core 2.16.14
I hope the bug hasn’t returned. But for sure it’s not installing any i686 versions that I’m telling it to install. Don’t get any errors from it either. I only find out at the end when I try to install something that requires it.

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Yeah it definitely doesn’t install i686 packages using 2.16.14 so I’ve dropped support for RHEL 8. Now that I’m on 2.18.2 it’s working OK.

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Please file a bug report. FWIW, 2.16.14 is successfully installing this i686 package in the test, so it must not cover your reproducer dnf - arches must be the same in the is_newer_installed check (#83417… · ansible/ansible@58b22a3 · GitHub.