The minimum supported version of `hvac` will change in `v5.0.0`

SUMMARY

Historically we have not had strict requirements on the version of hvac that's required. We have tried to document which features work in which versions of hvac, and where possible, to have the code fall back to methods that work in earlier versions (a lot of early methods were deprecated in favor of new ones, and we have supported both where we can).

It's also worth noting that we don't specify a version of hvac to install in our tests and CI. This is for a few reasons:

ansible-test does not make this easy
our CI resources are already limited and frankly a bit overextended as we test against several versions of ansible-core and python

The result is that our tests typically end up running against the latest version of hvac, except possibly recently where hvac has become more strict about which versions of python it supports; so in some cases where we test against earlier versions of Python, we may end up installing the last version of hvac that supported it.

I don't see the above situation changing any time soon.

That being said, with hvac reaching its 1.0.0 milestone, I think it's time we formally set a minimum version of hvac.

I have not yet decided what version that will be, but it will be at least v1.0.2 which is the latest version at the time of this writing. That may change if certain critical features or fixes get released in hvac in the meantime.

What this means

While we may not rush to remove compatibility code for very old versions of hvac, those fallbacks might get removed over time, especially since they are harder to test.

It also means we won't go out of our way to add such fallbacks, nor would we require that of contributors.

We MAY accept contributions which add fallbacks to earlier versions, if they include adequate test coverage (which might be difficult due to the factors above).

ISSUE TYPE

Deprecation Notice

ansible-collections / community.hashi_vault