vmware.alb inclusion in the ansible package?

[dericcrago]

Hi, we received a PR (https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.network/pull/288) to remove the avi modules from the community.network collection. However, the vmware.alb collection is not currently included in the ansible package, so it would appear we have 2 options (see https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.network/pull/288#issuecomment-865636980). Would you like to add the vmware.alb collection to the ansible package or remove the avi modules from the community.network collection without the inclusion of vmware.alb? Please see https://github.com/ansible-collections/ansible-inclusion for more information about inclusion.

[sabandi]

Hi @dericcrago

We would like to remove the avi modules from community.network and keep the vmware.alb collection out of the Ansible core. Please let me know if that works.

[dericcrago]

Hi @sabandi, thank you for your reply. I just want to make sure I understand since sometimes the terminology can be confusing. When I mentioned the ansible package, I meant ansible (https://pypi.org/project/ansible/), not ansible-core (https://pypi.org/project/ansible-core/).

Scenario	Outcome
Current situation	The ansible package includes the community.network collection and that collection includes the avi modules
PR proposal	The avi modules will be removed from the community.network collection and thus the ansible package will no longer include any avi modules unless they are explicitly installed via ansible-galaxy
Another alternative	Request the inclusion of the vmware.alb collection into the ansible package and time the removal of the avi modules from the community.network collection to happen at the same time so that the transition is relatively seamless for the end user

So with that in mind, do you still want to remove the avi modules from the community.network collection without the inclusion of the vmware.alb collection into the ansible package (not ansible-core, but ansible)?

[sabandi]

Thanks @dericcrago for the detailed response. Our current approach would be to remove the avi modules from community.network collection in ansible.

Having said that, I want to explore the option of adding our vmware.alb to community.network in future. Would moving to community.network tie our release cadence with anisble release ?

[dericcrago]

@sabandi, that's interesting, I hadn't considered adding vmware.alb to community.network. I'm not sure if that will realistically be an option though. The original intent of community.network was to keep network plugins / modules that didn't already have a collection in the ansible package. Since there is already a vmware.alb collection, it would likely make more sense to just apply for the vmware.alb collection to be included in the ansible package.

As far as releases go, as long as you followed semver, you could do whatever you wanted and the ansible package would just pick up the appropriate version at build time. Please see the collection requirements for more details.

[gundalow]

Why were the sanity tests disabled in https://github.com/vmware/ansible-collection-alb/commit/8f8df7b6f7988bca03ac0cbb12bbd3484200472e? What's the plan to get them running again? Do you need help with this?

[sabandi]

@sabandi, that's interesting, I hadn't considered adding vmware.alb to community.network. I'm not sure if that will realistically be an option though. The original intent of community.network was to keep network plugins / modules that didn't already have a collection in the ansible package. Since there is already a vmware.alb collection, it would likely make more sense to just apply for the vmware.alb collection to be included in the ansible package.

As far as releases go, as long as you followed semver, you could do whatever you wanted and the ansible package would just pick up the appropriate version at build time. Please see the collection requirements for more details.

Thanks @dericcrago for the detailed response. Now that we have finalised on keeping the vmware.alb outside the Ansible repo. Is there anything blocking us from removing avi modules from the community.network

[gundalow]

Thanks @dericcrago for the detailed response. Now that we have finalised on keeping the vmware.alb outside the Ansible repo. Is there anything blocking us from removing avi modules from the community.network

The next steps would be:

1. Raise an Inclusion Request to get vmware.alb added to the ansible package
2. One the above is merged git rm the plugins from community.network and update meta/runtime.yml to point to vmware.alb (prevents broken backwards compatability)

[grastogi23]

adding @chaitanyaavi to the thread.

[chandanapatnala]

Hi, The community.network collections is showing an error while accessing that the repo has been disabled- https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.network . Is this temporary and is a timeline specified as when it'll be accessible again?

[gundalow]

Thanks for reporting this. We are investigating.