Ansible 0.4 released --

[Michael DeHaan]

Or should I say, hits the ground running.

This is a huge release, namely because of the breadth of contribution
here. Contributions include:

Michael DeHaan (135), Jeroen Hoekx (25), Seth Vidal (15), Stephen
Fromm (13), John Kleint (7), jkleint (6), cocoy (6), Matthew Williams
(5), Daniel Néri (5), Jim Richardson (4), Cosmin Luță (3), Brendan
Beveridge (3), felix (2), Wes Johnson (2), Rafal Lewczuk (2), Peter
Sankauskas (2), Michel Blanc (2), Tim Bielawa (1), Reed Murphy (1),
Matt Goodall (1), Matt Coddington (1), Chris Read (1), Brad Olson (1),
Adam Denenberg (1)

And also a few people where attribution wasn't quite applied because I
might have squash merged your patch and mangled the attribution.

====

The changelog is also pretty killer:

Internals/Core

internal inventory API now more object oriented, parsers decoupled
async handling improvements
misc fixes for running ansible on OS X (overlord only)
sudo improvements, now works much more smoothly
sudo to a particular user with -U/--sudo-user, or using
'sudo_user: foo' in a playbook
--private-key CLI option to work with pem files

Inventory

can use -i host1,host2,host3:port to specify hosts not in
inventory (replaces --override-hosts)
ansible INI style format can do groups of groups
[groupname:children] and group vars [groupname:vars]
groups and users module takes an optional system=yes|no on
creation (default no)
list of hosts in playbooks can be expressed as a YAML list in
addition to ; delimited

Playbooks

variables can be replaced like
${foo.nested_hash_key.nested_subkey[array_index]}
unicode now ok in templates (assumes utf8)
able to pass host specifier or group name in to "hosts:" with --extra-vars
ansible-pull script and example playbook (extreme scaling, remediation)
inventory_hostname variable available that contains the value of
the host as ansible knows it
variables in the 'all' section can be used to define other
variables based on those values
'group_names' is now a variable made available to templates
first_available_file feature, see selective_file_sources.yml in
examples/playbooks for info
--extra-vars="a=2 b=3" etc, now available to inject parameters
into playbooks from CLI

Incompatible Changes -- these may require some changes to your
playbooks or scripts

jinja2 is only usable in templates, not playbooks, use $foo instead
--override-hosts removed, can use -i with comma notation (-i "ahost,bhost")
modules can no longer include stderr output (paramiko limitation from sudo)


Module Changes

tweaks to SELinux implementation for file module
fixes for yum module corner cases on EL5
file module now correctly returns the mode in octal
fix for symlink handling in the file module
service takes an enable=yes|no which works with chkconfig or
updates-rc.d as appropriate
service module works better on Ubuntu
git module now does resets and such to work more smoothly on updates
modules all now log to syslog
enabled=yes|no on a service can be used to toggle chkconfig &
updates-rc.d states
git module supports branch=
service fixes to better detect status using return codes of the
service script
custom facts provided by the setup module mean no dependency on
Ruby, facter, or ohai
service now has a state=reloaded
raw module for bootstrapping and talking to routers w/o Python, etc

Misc Bugfixes

fixes for variable parsing in only_if lines
misc fixes to key=value parsing
variables with mixed case now legal
fix to internals of hacking/test-module development script

[Michael DeHaan]

Hit send too early! WAIT A MINUTE, WAIT A MINUTE, I'M NOT DONE!

New downloads:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/downloads

New tags:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/tags

In just a few minutes, I'm going to merge devel back to the 'master'
branch (for possible hotfix needs), and 0.5 will kick off. I'll share
a little bit about the near term future of 0.5 in a seperate email.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release in every way --
whether helping spread the word about Ansible, helping with docs,
filling out the user survey, helping users on IRC, testing or adding
code -- you make everything worth it.

[AD]

nice work, congrats everyone.