Reading the docs, I was a bit confused as to how to specify multiple hosts/groups in a playbook. Being YAML, I assumed a normal YAML list would work:
---
- hosts: [host1, host2]
But this crashes when inventory._matches() assumes hosts is a string. This patch just checks if hosts is a list, and turns it into a string joined by ';'.
runner._return_from_module() normally returns a list (?) of `[str,bool,dict,str]`, but on error it returns `[str,bool,str,str]`. runner._chain_file_module() then tries to call .get() on the third item (`data2`), which fails when it's a string. This patch only accesses `data2` if the return value was `ok`. It might be better to return consistent types in both cases, but I'm not sure where/how else the return value is used.
The basic idea is sudo /bin/sh -c 'quoted_command'. We use Paramiko's low-level API to set a timeout, get a pseudo tty, execute sudo and the (shell quoted) command atomically, wait just until sudo is ready to accept the password before sending it down the pipe, and then return the command's stdout and stderr.
This should be faster, as there are no unneeded sleeps. There are no permissions issues reading the output. It will raise socket.timeout if the command takes too long. However, this is a per-read timeout, not a total execution timeout, so as long as the command is writing output and you are reading it, it will not time out.
Local and non-sudo commands remain unchanged, but should probably adopt a similar approach.
Since this is a significant change, it needs a lot of testing. Also, someone smarter than I should double-check the quoting and execution, since it is a security issue.
The value is passed to apt-get's "-t" option. Useful for installing backports, e.g.:
ansible webservers -m apt -a "pkg=nginx state=latest default-release=squeeze-backports"
This adjusts behavior of file module such that removal of se* option
does not revert the file's selinux context to the default. In order to
go back to the default context according to the policy, you can use the
context=default option.
