Unmaintained collection: frr.frr

There has been a deprecation announcement in The Bullhorn #123 for the frr.frr collection. It says there won’t be any more major releases, but I don’t see any minor or even bugfix release either for quite some time.

There is no information about deprecation neither in the repo nor on galaxy. However, I suggest to remove it ASAP. That is in the Ansible Community Package 11.

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I have created a Removal from Ansible Community Package issue in the repository. It’s loosely based on the text that I use for the Identifying and removing an unmaintained collection process. But since they did announce the removal in The Bullhorn but nowhere else, this doesn’t really fit and I’ve improvised a bit.

There are also failing sanity tests.

Hello @mariolenz! I’m from the Ansible Network team, that maintains the frr.frr collection. This collection was deprecated in December, 2023 and will reach end-of-life on December, 2025. During this period, we will only be doing patch releases for this collection if a critical bug or security vulnerability has been reported.

We will continue to run ansible-test in CI for ansible-core<=2.17, >=2.15 and as such compatibility with ansible-core versions >2.17 will not be guaranteed.

I have opened a PR that fixes the sanity failure with >=stable-2.16 and also an update to the README mentioning all the above. (Apologies to the Community for not doing that along with the Bullhorn announcement.)

Please let me know if the above points would qualify this collection to continue being included in the Ansible Community Package.

Thank you!

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Thanks @nilashishc, this is a very important and valuable information!

This sounds like we shouldn’t remove the collection ASAP / from Ansible 11. But also that we might want to announce the deprecation / removal from a future version of the Ansible Community Package. If we keep releasing new Ansible versions as we did in the past, I think 13 would have an ETA of around November 2025 and would be a good time.

Ansible 11 is based on ansible-core 2.18, which is no longer officially supported by frr.frr then. Because of that I’m a bit hesitant to keep it included until Ansible 13. We definitely have to discuss this though :slight_smile:

I agree, Compatibility with ansible-core>2.17 is not guaranteed looks problematic.

Moving the discussion to Several collections have been deprecated by the Ansible Network team.

Since this collection hasn’t been only deprecated, but it’s clear now that ansible-core 2.18 won’t be supported (see here and here) we have to remove it from the Ansible Community Package 11 because it will be based on this.

Remove frr.frr and openvswitch.openvswitch

FYI We’ve talked about this in the community meeting and decided we don’t need a vote on this because of Removing a collection that has been explicitly deprecated or abandoned by its (former) maintainers.

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SGTM. Should our exclusion procedure be update to state it explicitly?
Anyway, @mariolenz @nilashishc @felixfontein thanks for working on this!

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