I'm not an Ansible developer, so I can't speak for the project, obviously. But I'd guess the reason is that Ansible uses a whole lot of things that are found only in Unix/Linux/BSD operating systems. As a very basic (and fundamental) example, SSH isn't typically available on Windows. Ansible not only uses SSH to talk to the majority of devices out there, but it very heavily relies on a lot of features built deep into OpenSSH, specifically. Another thing, off the top of my head, is that Windows handles temp files differently, and it's important to get that right. And so on.
Many things could be compensated for or worked around, but there are so many differences, and the differences are so great, that it would take a lot of programmer time to maintain all the parallel code. Given that programmer time spent on that couldn't be spent on features and performance and functionality and so on, it's probably not worth the effort. (Especially given that you can, technically, run it on Windows with the extra effort that you mentioned.) -- Todd On Monday, August 27, 2018 at 12:46:00 PM UTC-4, Thorsten Schöning wrote: > > Hi all > > I'm doing some research about managing my Ubuntu servers using > Ansible, but am using a Windows 10 myself and therefore would like to > run Ansible on my Windows host. The servers to manage are Linux only > for now, though. I've already read in the documentation that such a > setup is not supported[1] and about usual workarounds using Cygwin[2] > or the new WSL[3]. > > What I didn't find yet is thorough documentation about what exactly > doesn't work or better why. People only seem to tell that it doesn't > work and what they use instead, like the mentioned links above, but > not the actual problems they ran into. Looking at e.g. what needs to > be installed for Cygwin, at least many of the software requirements > seem to be available natively under Windows, some of them like cURL, > Python, SSH, OpenSSL etc. are already installed for me. > > So, is there any summary of what the key problems are running Ansible > natively under Windows? Something like blog posts, open bugs in GitHub > or such? I didn't find anything. > > Thanks! > > [1]: > http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/windows_faq.html#can-ansible-run-on-windows > > [2]: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/running-ansible-within-windows > [3]: > https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/using-ansible-through-windows-10s-subsystem-linux > > > Mit freundlichen Grüßen, > > Thorsten Schöning > > -- > Thorsten Schöning E-Mail: [email protected] > AM-SoFT IT-Systeme http://www.AM-SoFT.de/ > > Telefon...........05151- 9468- 55 > Fax...............05151- 9468- 88 > Mobil..............0178-8 9468- 04 > > AM-SoFT GmbH IT-Systeme, Brandenburger Str. 7c, 31789 Hameln > AG Hannover HRB 207 694 - Geschäftsführer: Andreas Muchow > > -- 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/ec5c0fe1-538c-4233-afea-9c379fb8b433%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
