Ansible apt module unable to remove packages not in CURSTATE_INSTALLED

[ZachOldham]

Summary

The apt module never attempts to remove packages that are in a state other than CURSTATE_INSTALLED according to apt_pkg. This means that packages in any of CURSTATE_UNPACKED, CURSTATE_HALF_CONFIGURED, CURSTATE_HALF_INSTALLED, or CURSTATE_CONFIG_FILES cannot be removed using the ansible apt module.

All possible states can be seen here, and the state check can be seen here.

This was an issue for us as we had a package with a bad post install script that left the package in CURSTATE_HALF_CONFIGURED and were then unable to remove that package with ansible, and were forced to directly invoke apt remove via the ansible command module.

It may be unexpected behavior by ansible to remove packages in these other states, but at least having a configuration option so that it is possible to remove them would be greatly beneficial.

Issue Type

Feature Idea

Component Name

apt

Additional Information

Adding a configuration option to the apt module to allow removal of packages in these other states would allow packages that were badly installed to be removed by the ansible apt module. Currently, we have to update our playbook to use the ansible command module to directly run apt remove on this package in order to cover the case where the package is badly installed. It would be much better if we could natively use the apt module to accomplish this.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the Ansible Code of Conduct

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Files identified in the description:

• lib/ansible/modules/apt.py

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[s-hertel]

@ZachOldham The purge option handles this, can you verify? has_files is true here https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/modules/apt.py#L939 if /var/lib/dpkg/info/package_name.list can be read, which dpkg creates when processing the archive.

needs_info

[ZachOldham]

@s-hertel It seems that the purge option does generally work for this, but it does not work for our specific use case. We do not want to remove the package configuration files or logs, and purge does remove them. I suppose that is probably not an issue for most people who run into this issue, and purge would probably work for them, so this may be a more niche feature request than I originally thought. We would, however, still like to see this config option.