ansible/docs/docsite/rst/roadmap/ROADMAP_2_4.rst

Ansible by Red Hat, Core 2.4

Target: June/July 2017

This is meant to be a living document, and is DRAFT until stated otherwise in the document.

• Python 2.4 and 2.5 support discontinuation
  • Ansible will not support Python 2.4 nor 2.5 on the target hosts anymore. Going forward, Python 2.6+ will be required on targets, as already is the case on the controller.
• Ansible-Config
  • New yaml format for config
  • Extend the ability of the current config system by adding creating an ansible-config command and add the following:
    • Dump existing config settings
    • Update / write a config entry
    • Show available options (ini entry, yaml, env var, etc)
  • Proposal found in ansible/proposals issue #35.
  • Initial PR of code found in ansible/ansible PR #12797.
• Inventory Overhaul
  • Current inventory is overtly complex, non modular and mostly still a legacy from inception. We also want to add a common set of features to most inventory sources but are hampered by the current code base.
  • Proposal found in ansible/proposals issue #41.
• PluginLoader Refactor
  • Over the past couple releases we've had some thoughts about how PluginLoader might be better structured
    • Load the loaders via an initialization function(), not when importing the module. (stretch goal, doesn't impact the CLI)
    • Separate duties of PluginLoader from PluginFinder. Most plugins need both but Modules and Module_utils only need a PluginFinder
    • Write different PluginFinder subclasses for Module_utils and perhaps Modules. Most Plugin types have a flattened namespace and are single python files. Modules include code that is not written in python. Module_utils are vastly different from the other Plugins as they maintain a hierarchical namespace and are multi-file.
    • Potentially split module_utils loader for python from module_utils loader for powershell. Currently we only support generic module_utils for python modules. The powershell modules always include a single, hardcoded powershell module_utils file. If we add generic module_utils for powershell, we'll need to decide how to organize the code.
• Facts Refreshening
  • Make setup.py/facts more pluggable
  • Fact gathering policy finer grained
  • Improve testing of setup.py/facts.py
• Cloud Provider Support
  • Focus on pull requests for various modules
  • Triage existing merges
• Contributor Quality of Life
  • More bot improvements!