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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

Now if only they could merge in modules that have been sitting in Pull Requests for months at a time. I submitted a module that has been requested since 2015 and it can't seem to find its way into the main project (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/22097)

Also there are currently over 1000 open PR's. RH needs to devote more bandwith to community integration then they have been.

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(Ansible lead here) As I responded to a similar comment on Twitter the other day, part of the issue is our volume. When I looked, we had merged 395 PRs in the last month (via github pulse), which is ~33/day, assuming we work every day (which some of us do). That also includes a large period of time in which we were in a feature freeze for 2.3, meaning we weren't merging things in for a bit of the time. That's still about 3 prs per day per team member working on the code on top of everything else we do. This does not take into account the triaging of new issues, dealing with existing open issues, the mailing list, IRC questions, running public meetings... We've grown the team quite a bit (and are continuing to do so), but you can only do so much so fast.

We have recently enhanced ansibot to automerge PRs much more quickly without a core team member needing to be in the loop (the community is responsible for getting things automerged), so this will hopefully help even more so with getting PRs merged.

As for your PR, I'm a little confused as it says it was submitted on Feb 28th? Was that moved over from one of the modules repos? If so, I couldn't find any references to `iam_managed_policy` in either the -core or -extras repos.

the initial request for managed policy support dates back to 2015. I finally got around to cleaning up my module and publishing it this year, but its been a long wait for some of the fringe bits of AWS to be able to be managed under ansible.

I also submitted a very simple module which might benefit from improvement by other developers in a PR. It just integrates Facebook's osquery with the Ansible facts.

I'm pretty sure it is nothing special. It was my first Ansible module and later on I discovered the library pattern (putting modules in ./library makes them accessible to ansible and ansible-playbook).

So I propose to have a more open ansible-library repository which users would be able to git clone or symlink to ./library. This should increase eyeballs on the new modules and maybe we could have a voting system in place to promote modules from there into the main repository.

Or they could focus on making sure the code is solid.

Accepting thousands of modules from random people has downsides on the maintainability of the project and the consistency of the user experience.

Ansible by nature is a lot of independent modules doing different things. It is always a tough call to decide what goes in and what doesn't go in, and the project could go pretty bad quickly if they start merging anything.

Just out of curiosity, how is that module tested? It is one new file without a single test. How people know it works and change it knowing it still works?

There isn't a very good automated testing strategy for ansible modules. If you look in the documentation there are examples that should exercise all the code paths, so a future developer can validate it is still working by running it with those examples. So much of the logic of the module requires you to interact with boto that without a substantial mocking of that interface the tests would be effectively worthless.

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