[talk] New Ideas Ansible Unify or Not: was Re: classifying BSD init

[Patrik Lundin]

On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 03:46:30PM +0530, Sujit K M wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Patrik Lundin <patrik at sigterm.se> wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 07:44:32AM +0530, Sujit K M wrote:
> >> On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 6:47 PM, Patrik Lundin <patrik at sigterm.se> wrote:
> >>
> >> These are just documentation of the yum/apt or openbsd modules. Below
> >> what I mean.
> >>
> >> https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Ansible_-_Only_if_on_specific_distribution_or_distribution_version.html
> >>
> >
> > What I am aiming for is writing playbooks where ansible already takes
> > care of the "when: ansible_distribution ==" magic (which it does, and
> > populates the "ansible_pkg_mgr" fact for you).
> 
> So why do you want to do this?
>

It is less to type, and less logic to keep track of yourself.

>
> Say are writing a playbook for apache HTTPD, which I hope is free from any Linux
> distributions, this should work cleanly right now. Could you be please
> be more clearer.
> 

It can be done currently by calling $ansible_pkg_mgr for installing the package,
and the "service" module directly for starting it.

Being able to document that you should use $ansible_service_mgr instead
makes the playbook layout more uniform in my view (and leads the way for
how other modules performing another task using different backend tools
should be written).

I feel that this discussion should be continued in the context of PRs
against the ansible code base. Hope you are OK with that.

-- 
Patrik Lundin