New Ansible release candidates 2.9.16rc1 and 2.8.18rc1

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce the release candidates of Ansible 2.9.16rc1
and 2.8.18rc1 are now available!

These are release candidates that you can use for testing the next available
minor releases of ansible early.

How do you get it?
------------------

$ pip install ansible==2.9.16rc1 --user
or
$ pip install ansible==2.8.18rc1 --user

The tar.gz of the releases can be found here:

* 2.9.16rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.16rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: 07a7da9a3f25b05eef9b09d9f7e2436d5753ecfca86ab3bfab6bf1fb6740fdef
* 2.8.18rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.8.18rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: 002ef7e901ee6ad0f1776198d4cef20c4f676c076c1824ac6c52db3129bb5e75


What's new in 2.9.16rc1 and 2.8.18rc1
-------------------------------------

These releases are maintenance releases containing numerous bugfixes. The full
changelogs are at:

* 2.9.16rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst
* 2.8.18rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.8/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.8.rst


What's the schedule for future maintenance releases?
----------------------------------------------------

The general availability (GA) version of this release is scheduled for
Monday, December 14.

The next set of RCs is currently scheduled for January 11th, with
those GA versions landing on January 18th.


Porting Help
------------

We've published a porting guide at
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/porting_guides/porting_guide_2.9.html to
help migrate your content to 2.9.


If you discover any errors or if any of your working playbooks break when you
upgrade to 2.9.16rc1, please use the following link to report the regression:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/new/choose

In your issue, be sure to mention the Ansible version that works and the one
that doesn't.

Thanks!

-Rick Elrod