Handle None and Blank value for sysctl module

[Akasurde]

SUMMARY

Fix adds check for values provided by user for
name and value in sysctl module.
While providing name and value as in-line params,
check for blank values

Fixes #20176

Signed-off-by: Abhijeet Kasurde akasurde@redhat.com

ISSUE TYPE

• Bugfix Pull Request

COMPONENT NAME

lib/ansible/modules/system/sysctl.py

ANSIBLE VERSION

2.4 devel

[ansibot]

cc @davixx
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[dagwieers]

If the parameter is required, it cannot be None. That's implicit, so this check should not be necessary.

[Akasurde]

@dagwieers Thanks for your review. I added this check, because I am facing weird a behaviour, correct me if I am wrong.

Here is demo module which contains name and mode as required parameters.
When I use, ansible-playbook command with following yaml file

- name: sample demo
   demo:
      name:
      mode:

I am getting name and mode as None.

Same case goes with following -

# ansible -m demo -a "name= mode=" localhost

here, I am getting name and mode as "" (blank value)
Let me know, if these behaviours are different from the normal ones. This is only reason, I have added following two checks in sysctl modules, because sysctl was writing blank values to given sysctl.conf file like the issue describes.

[dagwieers]

Hmm, your first example should not return None values, but empty strings IMO. If you want to assign None-values, you could do that using null. And that would be caught by the required=True.

So if this is true, that seems to be a bug.
You are right, YAML interprets no value as None (or null). And I stand corrected. I doubt a lot of modules handle this correctly as None is the default value (which means the parameter was not provided).

[Akasurde]

@dagwieers Do I need to do something else to get this PR rolling ?

[bcoca]

So i'm not sure if we should fix this globally (require a value aside from parameter being present) ... should None/''/empty values be significant to module itself?