Hello, after yesterday's thread I've goggled a bit more around ansible and variables and I've figured out the following facts (of which many of you are probably aware but I'm new of the environment):
- the precedence of the variables is set in stone: a lot of people rely on that and tweaking it is out of discussion; - several people using ansible are baffled by the inability to override from the inventory the variables set by a role (I've googled several articles discussing about the topic). My proposal is to add an include_defaults with the same behaviour of include_vars but whose values can be overridden using the usual mechanism. The rationale has been explained yesterday: it is not uncommon to have dependencies across roles. If role B depends on role A it cannot use values for variables provided by A unless these values are specified globally, e.g. in group_vars/all. This breaks roles encapsulation and forces the maintenance of larger-than-necessary group_vars files. Using include_defaults only B is exposed to the variables whose default is provided by A and group_vars files only need to override the more generic values provided by the role as fallback. I think my proposal is simple and doesn't change radically the way ansible works (e.g. introducing a new level of vars precedence) and totally backward-compatible as it uses a new command. Reading the commentary about the topic I think it is a model many people expect and some users have developed their own hacks to work around the limitation (e.g. using no-tasks dependencies). The feature is implemented in my branch <https://github.com/dvarrazzo/ansible/tree/include_defaults> and consists of just a new plugin, no change to the tasks runner. It may be missing something or could be designed in a different way (e.g. it could be a "include_vars target=default" instead of a new command, or it could take "role=name" instead of a full path to automatically include role/defaults/main.yml): feedback is welcome. I'm happy to know what other users and above all the developers think about the feature. Again, thank you very much for the invaluable tool you have provided. -- Daniele -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ansible Project" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/57efe44c-4dae-4356-a014-757074547bfb%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
