I am very afraid I am jumping into a lion's den here... However,
I am going to try to alleviate some concerns.
Our move from EPEL to Extras was actually to solve for the needs of RHEL and the RHEL
System Roles. We needed to be in a channel that customers could consume from that
wasn't EPEL.
Upon our move to Extras, we immediately identified a problem. That problem was, we
Ansible, were not able to release as often as we preferred/needed for our customers. We
also were facing confusion about what did support mean once a package was inside of
Extras.
As such, we made the decision to two things.
1. Deprecate Ansible from Extras.
2. Provide access to Ansible via a Red Hat trusted delivery mechanism.
For #2, EPEL obviously is not the route to take for some customers. So, we decided that
all RHEL customers would have full access to the Subscription channel. We also specified
that if a customer wanted support, they would still need to purchase a subscription.
We had a very delicate situation here. There were a lot of check and balances that had
to be met before we could make any announcement. So that's why it has been "a
little quiet."
The security advisory link posted above, and this link
<
https://access.redhat.com/articles/3359651> attempt to cover the bulk of the
possible questions that may arise.
That being said, we still aim to provide our customers/users the ability to obtain
Ansible any way they choose. So if the user does not want to use the channel or cannot
use it for any reason, they still have the ability to pull from EPEL or our
releases.ansible.com pages. As far as we're concerned, it is functionally the same
application no matter where it comes from.. If a customer has a subscription; they will be
supported.
I, the Product Manager of Ansible Engine, am staying on top of these concerns as they
come by. So far, no huge customer/user concerns have caused any alarm. Most users have
embraced the moves, and have continued to automate.
Thank you very much for joining the conversation.
It's a significant relief that from your point of view it doesn't
matter where it comes from.
For what it is worth we (speaking somewhat on behalf of my team but
not as a spokesperson of the company I'm presently contracted at)
prefer it to come from EPEL, and are grateful to see it return there
from extras for a variety of reasons.
We are also very grateful for your preview/nightly repositories and
plan in our CI environment to take advantage of these in a more
aggressive fashion to catch regressions early that may affect us so we
can report them upstream ASAP in future.
It's useful and refreshing to get some of the background of the
decisions made, and though communication wasn't great, it's all nice
and plain for people to find in the archives and we can move forward
in a positive fashion as a community :)
Now ... time to go through a few dozen roles switching out 'with_*'
for 'loop' and fixing up 'when' conditionals ... got to hurry before
2.9 appears :)