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On 8/3/20 12:36 PM, Sagi Shnaidman wrote:
> Hi, Bogdan
> 
> thanks for raising this up, although I'm not sure I understand what it 
> is the problem with using action plugins.
> Action plugins are well known official extensions for Ansible, as any 
> other plugins - callback, strategy, inventory etc [1]. It is not any 
> hack or unsupported workaround, it's a known and official feature of 
> Ansible. Why can't we use it? What makes it different from filter, 

I believe the cases that require the use of those should be justified. 
For the given example, that manages containers in a loop via calling a 
module, what the written custom callback plugin buys for us? That brings 
code to maintain, extra complexity, like handling possible corner cases 
in async mode, dry-run mode etc. But what is justification aside of 
looks handy?

> lookup, inventory or any other plugin we already use?
> Action plugins are also used wide in Ansible itself, for example 
> templates plugin is implemented with action plugin [2]. If Ansible can 
> use it, why can't we? I don't think there is something with "fixing" 
> Ansible, it's not a bug, this is a useful extension.
> What regards the mentioned action plugin for podman containers, it 
> allows to spawn containers remotely while skipping the connection part 
> for every cycle. I'm not sure you can "fix" Ansible not to do that, it's 
> not a bug. We may not see the difference in a few hosts in CI, but it 
> might be very efficient when we deploy on 100+ hosts oro even 1000+ 
> hosts. In order to evaluate this on bigger setups to understand its 
> value we configured both options - to use action plugin or usual module.
> If better performance of action plugin will be proven, we can switch to 
> use it, if it doesn't make a difference on bigger setups - then I think 
> we can easily switch back to using an usual module.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> [1] https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/plugins/plugins.html
> [2] 
> https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/plugins/action/template.py
> 
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 11:19 AM Bogdan Dobrelya <bdobreli at redhat.com 
> <mailto:bdobreli at redhat.com>> wrote:
> 
>     There is a trend of writing action plugins, see [0], for simple things,
>     like just calling a module in a loop. I'm not sure that is the
>     direction
>     TripleO should go. If ansible is inefficient in this sort of tasks
>     without custom python code written, we should fix ansible. Otherwise,
>     what is the ultimate goal of that trend? Is that having only action
>     plugins in roles and playbooks?
> 
>     Please kindly asking the community to stop that, make a step back and
>     reiterate with the taken approach. Thank you.
> 
>     [0] https://review.opendev.org/716108
> 
> 
>     -- 
>     Best regards,
>     Bogdan Dobrelya,
>     Irc #bogdando
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Best regards
> Sagi Shnaidman


-- 
Best regards,
Bogdan Dobrelya,
Irc #bogdando