Name variable no longer inherited

[mscherer]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

core

ANSIBLE VERSION

CONFIGURATION

Nothing special

SUMMARY

So I do use variable inheritence quite a lot, especially to define roles that pull others roles with specific change. However, I found that if a variable is called name, this is no longer inherited.

I bisected to that commit:
0d35a69

I suspect the "inherit=False" is the root cause of my issue. I did verify that changing the name of the variable do fix the issue (e.g., it only manifests for 'name', not for 'name2'.

I do use this construct for example on https://github.com/gluster/gluster.org_ansible_configuration/blob/master/playbooks/deploy_proxy_vm.yml with a common set of param being set by using meta and dependencies on https://github.com/gluster/gluster.org_ansible_configuration/blob/master/roles/guest_proxy_rht/meta/main.yml

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

play.yml

---
- hosts: 127.0.0.1
  roles:
  - role: foo
    name: foo1

roles/foo/meta/main.yml

---
dependencies:
- role: foo2

roles/foo2/tasks/main.yml

---
- name: "Test if {{ name }} is defined"
  debug:
    var: name

EXPECTED RESULTS

I expected this message to be displayed:

TASK [foo2 : Test if {{ name }} is defined] *************************************************************
ok: [127.0.0.1] => {
    "name2": "foo1"
}

ACTUAL RESULTS

This message is displayed

TASK [foo2 : Test if {{ name }} is defined] *************************************************************

ok: [127.0.0.1] => {
    "name": "VARIABLE IS NOT DEFINED!"
}

[bcoca]

Possible Misunderstanding

Hi!

Thanks very much for your submission to Ansible. It sincerely means a lot to us.

We believe the ticket you have filed is being somewhat misunderstood, as one thing works a little differently than stated.

This was actually a bug fix, role name is NOT a variable but a property of the role that is aliased/overlaps with the role property. If you need a 'name' variable, use the vars: property to define it.

In the future, this might be a topic more well suited for the user list, which you can also post here if you'd like some more help with the above.

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project

Thank you once again for this and your interest in Ansible!

[mscherer]

That's still a behavior change that break existing playbook, and so should be documented at minima.

[mscherer]

Looking at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/playbooks_reuse_roles.html this is not documented or anything. So pushing a change as a bugfix for a non documented behavior that result in breakage of users playbooks is not really great, I would at least expect the usual deprecation cycle if that's the way we want to go, and have something somewhere in CHANGELOG.

[samdoran]

Role docs have been updated to use vars. There is a porting guide entry that addresses this change in behavior.