New release candidate: ansible 2.9.17rc1

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the Release Candidate Ansible 2.9.17rc1
is now available!


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

$ pip install ansible==2.9.17rc1 --user

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

* 2.9.17rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.17rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: efd5f8dc423b2dccfeab8c5f2491e499dadc813a9a64bf518eb06333aa42a6c5


What's new in 2.9.17rc1
-----------------------

This release is a maintenance release containing numerous bugfixes. The full
changelog is at:

* 2.9.17rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst


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

This Release Candidate is planned to become a General Availability
release in one week, on Monday, 18 January, 2021. The next set of
release candidates will be released three weeks after that date.


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 2.9.17rc1, 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