Bug#986213: RM: ansible/2.9.16+dfsg-1.1

[Lee Garrett <debian@rocketjump.eu>]

Hi Bas,

On 31/03/2021 20:20, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> On 3/31/21 7:30 PM, Lee Garrett wrote:
>> Unfortunately 2.10 didn't make it into bullseye in time (#984557). I tried
>> getting the unit tests from 2.9.16 to work with python 3.9, but I had to give
>> up. I don't feel comfortable with maintaining such a large package over the
>> lifecycle of bullseye without unit tests, official py3.9 support, and security
>> support running out in a few months, so please remove ansible from bullseye.
> 
> Shipping bullseye without ansible is going to make many users unhappy.
> 
> Will you actively maintain the package in bullseye-backports instead?

Up until now Pierre-Elliott Bécue has provided versions for backports,
and I'm happy to regulary upload ansible to backports, too.

However, ansible has a somewhat active deprecation cycle for
modules/features, meaning that backports users will be forced to adapt
their playbooks and roles with every feature release to avoid breakage.
Adding to this, there have been times where ansible in testing/unstable
was broken for a while due to moving python packages (the month long
breakage due to jinja2 which broke templating in many ansible modules
comes to mind).

So I don't think those users who have previously depended on ansible
from stable will be happy with using ansible from backports.

I can only say that I screwed up the migration process due to making a
few wrong assumptions about the finer details of the freeze process, and
I'm somewhat embarrassed about causing the release team additional work.
I had been working on packaging ansible 2.10 since December, and my
intention was to get ansible 2.10 into bullseye. Had I known what I know
now, I would have set my personal deadline differently, or raised the
issue with the release team earlier.

Those things said, I agree with Raphaël that ansible 2.10 is a good fit
for bullseye, and I'd maintain it over the life cycle of our next
release if the release team chooses to unblock it.

Kind regards,
Lee