Ansible sub-packages for easy dependencies install

[kustodian]

Proposal: Ansible sub-packages for easy dependencies install

Author: Strahinja Kustudic @kustodian

Date: 2017/11/03

• Status: New
• Proposal type: packaging
• Targeted Release: 2.5

Motivation

This is a follow up to https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/31719#issuecomment-337948271. Instead of adding additional dependencies into Ansible base packages, we should create additional Ansible packages which will make it easy to install all Ansible dependencies for filters, lookups, modules, etc.

Problems

• When a user installs the ansible package, that doesn't mean all the filters, lookups, plugins, etc will work. To resolve this issue a user needs to install additional python packages, usually using an Ansible playbook or some other way.
• We should make it easier to install Ansible with all it's dependencies on control machines
• Give the user flexibility to install only what the user needs

Solution proposal

• The idea is to provide additional ansible-* packages which will install dependencies for different types of Ansible modules, filters, lookups, etc.
  • These packages could just have deps to needed python packages, but they could also contain python modules (in cases when the distribution doesn't provide the needed python packages), but this can be further discussed. Make sure to check comments by @alikins in the old PR.
  • We still have to decide how exactly are these new packages going to be called and how will they be grouped, e.g. ansible-community-filters, ansible-aws-plugins, etc.

Documentation (optional)

Installation part of the documentation would need to be updated with the list of these packages.

[bcoca]

Closing this as 'collections' have opened this up for distro packagers to handle it directly.

We already provide an ansible-core package with minimal dependencies and collections provide most other plugins and modules that require specific dependencies.