Ansible vs. RHEL/Rocky

[microlinux]

Hi,

Nearly every major Linux distribution under the sun provides official packages for Ansible.

Back in 2015 Red Hat bought Ansible.

And still RHEL and downstream distributions have to use the third-party EPEL repository to install Ansible.

That strikes me as weird.

[jlehtone]

@microlinux

And still RHEL and downstream distributions have to use the third-party EPEL repository to install Ansible.

Should not need.

Isn’t ansible-core in appstream?

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EPEL has package ansible, but that is now merely:

Summary : Curated set of Ansible collections included in addition to ansible-core

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The ansible for RHEL 7 was old or lacking. Both EPEL and CentOS SIG did package newer versions, up to 2.9.
RHEL 8 did hop into newer Ansible, but delivers only the Core of it – collections are now elsewhere (EPEL or Ansible galaxy). RHEL [89] has also rhel-system-roles package (and that is the baffling bit – some roles in it depend on collections).

[Ritov]

This is a to narrow view. The reason for a restructure at the project level was the need to have a faster development cycle. Start a read here

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/release_and_maintenance.html

[jlehtone]

@Ritov

The reason for a restructure at the project level was the need to have a faster development cycle.

Agreed. All that is good.

My point was that RHEL does offer System Roles and does include Ansible to make them usable; neither RHEL nor Rocky does depend on EPEL for that.