New Ansible pre-release 2.9.0rc1

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the first release candidate of
Ansible 2.9, Ansible-2.9.0rc1 rc1 is now available!


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

$ pip install ansible==2.9.0rc1 --user

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

* 2.9.0rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.0rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: a24bac21f1cc15130b74851a1d3b5128c48d235d940ead25997c85337965e703


What's new in 2.9.0rc1
----------------------

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

* 2.9.0rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst


What's the schedule for the rest of 2.9.0?
----------------------------------------------------

Please see the ROADMAP for the schedule of future 2.9.0 releases
leading up to 2.9.0 final:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/ROADMAP_2_9.html

The 2.9.0rc1 release cycle was a little messy with some bugfixes that
were a little closer to features than normal making their way in.
Despite that, we think that this is a solid release candidate and we
currently don't see any blockers for the 2.9.0 release.

Please test out this release candidate, report any problems that you
encounter, and draw our attention to any that you'd like us to
consider as blockers for the 2.9.0 final release. The more time we
have to look at a potential blocker, the more likely we'll consider it
a blocker for release rather than something that we will fix in 2.9.1
instead.

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 2.9.0rc1, 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!

-Toshio Kuratomi