Clean up inconsistent min_ansible_version across roles

[geetikakay]

Issue

Right now in meta/main.yml across the roles in this repo, we have a mix of min_ansible_version values. I greped it from repo.

roles/sap_vm_provision/meta/main.yml:  min_ansible_version: 2.12
roles/sap_hypervisor_node_preconfigure/meta/main.yml:  min_ansible_version: "2.9"
roles/sap_vm_verify/meta/main.yml:  min_ansible_version: 2.12
roles/sap_vm_preconfigure/meta/main.yml:  min_ansible_version: 2.9
roles/sap_vm_temp_vip/meta/main.yml:  min_ansible_version: 2.12 

So, three roles require at least 2.12, two still say 2.9. The issue is that according to Ansible’s official maintenance policy, only one major version is actively supported at any tim and both 2.9 and 2.12 are already EOL. Keeping old versions gives the impression we support it, but it’s long out of support upstream.

How to resolve

I suggest we should only consider testing and supporting limited (Extended maintenance and above)version which means it will be 2.18 on wards.

[marcelmamula]

@geetikakay role meta files are not used for anything if only Collection is created. These files are used only if you are building Galaxy Roles, not Galaxy Collections.

We have agreed to sanity test against all versions starting 2.14 for some older RHEL versions, up to latest. You can find matrix of versions in my workflow file: https://github.com/sap-linuxlab/community.sap_infrastructure/blob/main/.github/workflows/ansible-test-sanity.yml

For real testing, not sanity, we are testing on:

• SUSE: ansible-core 2.18 and 2.19 on either Python 3.11 or 3.13
• Red Hat: ansible-core 2.18 and 2.19, sometimes 2.16 for compatibility.

Adding other project maintainers as this is not discussion specific to one repository. @berndfinger @rhmk @ja9fuchs

[geetikakay]

Thanks for the context. I get that the meta files don’t affect the testing setup but having those older versions listed still sends the message that we support them even though we don’t test them anymore.
Would be good to hear from the other maintainers on what the realistic minimum should be so we can align the metadata with what we actually support.