[Documentation] [ Shell ] explain shell requirements

ddimatos commented 6 days ago

Is there an existing issue for this?

[X] There are no existing issues.

Documentation issue description

The playbook repository today touches on how Rocket bash is not supported, with our new support matrix we do mention the z/OS shell is what is supported but we don't clearly explain that other shells are not (well not tested against).

With z/OS 3.1 and the inclusion of Open Enterprise Foundation for z/OS (OEF), we now have 4 shells: bash , sh, tcsh and zsh

We should be more definitive in the support docs on what is not supported; over time we can relax the requirements but to achieve z/OS 3.1 support, we should focus on what has worked for us, /bin/sh.

Docs: /bin/sh /bin/zsh /bin/tcsh

The products position will be to continue to only stand behind the default /bin/sh shell, all others will be unsupported. Only a few ibm_zos_core modules were tested with z/OS 3.1 /bin/zsh and worked fine, community modules such as command and shell failed to return readable stdout even when paired with iconv.

IBM z/OS Ansible core Version

v1.9.0 (default)

Ansible module

No response

ddimatos commented 5 days ago

With /bin/zsh set in inventory ansible_shell_executable: /bin/zsh

    - name: Show shell process used. 
      shell: "ps -p $$"
      # shell: "ps -p $$ | iconv -f ibm-1047 -t iso8859-1"
      register: result

Results in:

ok: [zvm] => {
    "result": {
        "changed": true,
        "cmd": "ps -p $$",
        "delta": "0:00:00.298883",
        "end": "2024-06-27 21:46:25.171281",
        "failed": false,
        "msg": "",
        "rc": 0,
        "start": "2024-06-27 21:46:24.872398",
        "stderr": "",
        "stderr_lines": [],
        "stdout": "@@@@@@@?@?@@@@@@@?@?\u0015@@?@o@@@@@@@@@?z?@a?a?\u0015",
        "stdout_lines": [
            "@@@@@@@?@?@@@@@@@?@?\u0015@@?@o@@@@@@@@@?z?@a?a?\u0015"
        ]
    }
}

ddimatos commented 5 days ago

Something to notice with the community module is that when the shell is sh we don't see the ansible-core message:

[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Non UTF-8 encoded data replaced with "?" while displaying text to stdout/stderr, this is temporary and will become an error. This feature will be removed
in version 2.18. Deprecation warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.
Where when the shell is zsh we do, which hints at this is somewhere in ansible-core and how the python STDOUT is getting handled.

ansible-collections / ibm_zos_core