made new sections for vars, started explaining scope, gave example on command line override of connection vars
added some formatting changes and clarifications
Hi @amenonsen - thanks for fixing up the hunting down the unicode bug and expanding test_addresses. The code looks good, merging!-- Be systematic about parsing and validating hostnames and addresses
These used to go in vars_cache, so merging them in after that as they
are "live" variables and the user would most likely want to see these
above anything else.
1. The test did "name: '{{hostnames}}.{{item}}'" inside a with_sequence
loop, which didn't do what was intended: it expanded hostnames into
an array, appended ".1", and set name to the resulting string. This
can be converted to a simple with_items loop.
2. Some of the entries in hostnames contained punctuation characters,
which I see no reason to support in inventory hostnames anyway.
3. Once the add_host failures are fixed, the playbook later fails when
the unicode hostnames are interpolated into debug output in ssh.py
due to an encoding error. This is only one of the many places that
may fail when using unicode inventory hostnames; we work around it
by providing an ansible_ssh_host setting.
Labels must start with an alphanumeric character, may contain
alphanumeric characters or hyphens, but must not end with a hyphen.
We enforce those rules, but allow underscores wherever hyphens are
accepted, and allow alphanumeric ranges anywhere.
We relax the definition of "alphanumeric" to include Unicode characters
even though such inventory hostnames cannot be used in practice unless
an ansible_ssh_host is set for each of them.
We still don't enforce length restrictions—the fact that we have to
accept ranges makes it more complex, and it doesn't seem especially
worthwhile.
This adds a parse_address(pattern) utility function that returns
(host,port), and uses it wherever where we accept IPv4 and IPv6
addresses and hostnames (or host patterns): the inventory parser
the the add_host action plugin.
It also introduces a more extensive set of unit tests that supersedes
the old add_host unit tests (which didn't actually test add_host, but
only the parsing function).