So there was a lot of activity today from pull requests, which is great!
Seth made the yum module work better on RHEL5 and made state=latest work better.
mgw made some template improvements – when templates fail, you will now get an error back explaining exactly what the errors are. He’s also been working on improving error handling in a few cases.
sfromm updated the user module to allow group=name instead of gid=X and ALSO contributed a groups module for creating/removing groups. We may further refine how group membership works so that is still a bit in flux, but will be available/documented very soon. IMHO this completes the core of ‘absolutely necessary modules’.
I’ve also updated the home page on the advice of a colleague that I didn’t explain why Ansible was so different than everything else very well – so now I’ve given the multi-node deployment use case a lot more text to explain why Configuration + Deployment can be done in one tool, and why I think the ordering and pull systems have some disadvantages in that area. See http://ansible.github.com … (thoughts on this welcome, please reply off list, very interested in making that clear).
The issues list is getting much smaller – and yes, it IS tracking some RFE ideas now. If you’d like to tackle any of the RFEs, please comment on the tickets so we don’t end up with two people racing to do the same thing. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues?sort=created&direction=desc&state=open – there are some easy low hanging fruit items and I’d be happy to help clarify what’s what if needed.
My short term plans remain focused on the core/docs since the module community is building up strongly… I will presumably tackle sudo support if no one else beats me to it in the next few days, as well as a request from today that vars and vars_files should present structured JSON to setup, rather than just strings.
As I shared previously, I really believe Ansible’s core, defines it’s scope well enough that “mostly done” is achievable for a wide set of use cases – and soon I think the focus can shift almost exclusively towards improving modules, docs, & examples (which are already pretty solid!). Pretty much all of the “architectural” kind of commits are already done, so it should be a pretty easy codebase to get to know for those wanting to contribute patches to it.
–Michael