Consider using requirements.yml and with ansible-galaxy to handle roles

[umeboshi2]

Newer versions of ansible have a nice requirements format, making the debops-update script more flexible.

I made a function here making use of it: https://github.com/umeboshi2/demosthenes/blob/master/demosthenes/scripts/demos_update.py#L103

A potential downside is that roles in version control are tarballed and extracted, rather than cloned into the roles_path.

I took the time to make a simple conversion of the galaxy requirements files in the debops-playbooks repo. debops/debops-playbooks#217

[drybjed]

It might be a good idea to at least support the .yml format in addition to the old one, so having them in the repository as a first step is good, thanks.

To be honest after using debops-update after all that time I'm still not sure which method is better - downloading and extracting tarballs, or cloning git repositories directly. I guess at this point there's very little difference. One advantage of debops-update over ansible-galaxy is that it also updates the debops-playbooks repository which holds the list of DebOps roles - that makes it very easy to add new roles to the stack or remove the obsolete ones from the requirelements list.

[umeboshi2]

Absolutley agree with the update command over using ansible-galaxy directly. I set that function up in demos-update to keep the playbook behavior, while getting more flexibility from the roles and using the locally configured roles_path at the same time. There may be a problem in the future if a path: option is defined for a role in the requirements file. I am convinced that it would be best to handle the point of cloning a role directly in ansible-galaxy, by making another role option in the yaml file, rather than trying to work around a shortcoming that can probably be more easily fixed at the source.

[umeboshi2]

There's currently an issue here for ansible-galaxy to track repos: ansible/ansible#12353