Ansible release 2.9.0b1, feature freeze, and stable-2.9 branching

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Hi all- Feature freeze for Ansible-2.9.0 was last week. At that time,
we also branched stable-2.9 from the devel branch. So features can
continue to be opened against devel. They just won't be backported to
stable-2.9.

The creation of the stable branch also means that if you have a bugfix
that should be applied to the 2.9.0 release, it needs to be backported
to the stable-2.9 branch after it has been merged into devel.
Standard rules about backports (no features, higher risk bugfixes will
be evaluated as to whether the risk outweighs the benefits, and
backports need to have changelog fragments) apply.

More information on backports can be found here:
http://docs.testing.ansible.com/ansible/latest/community/development_process.html?highlight=backport#backporting-merged-prs

Ansible 2.9.0 beta1
==============
Ansible 2.9.0b1 is now available!

This is the first pre-release of ansible-2.9.0 (which is due out in
the middle of October). It was scheduled to go out last week when we
branched stable-2.8 but we found several bugs which we decided to fix
before beta1. That makes beta1 one week late. We have enough time in
the schedule to absorb that slip without changing the dates for the
release candidates and final so there's no change to the rest of the
schedule at this time.

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

$ pip install ansible==2.9.0b1 --user

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

* 2.9.0b1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.0b1.tar.gz
SHA256: 170ebf5586d9510f6bc7f6ec4a4bfd39cdd46d56974fe5ac2b53ce720d8fedf7


What's new in 2.9.0b1
---------------------
The full changelog is at:

* 2.9.0b1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst


What's the schedule for future releases?
----------------------------------------------------
Please see the roadmap for the expected dates for the 2.9.0 release
candidates and final release:

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/ROADMAP_2_9.html

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 2.9.0b1, 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