Ansible 6.6.0 has been released!

[Christian Adams]

Hi all,

We're happy to announce that the Ansible 6.6.0 package has been released!

Ansible 6.6.0 will include ansible-core 2.13.6 as well as a curated set of
Ansible collections to provide a vast number of modules and plugins.

This is a major version update from Ansible 5.x which included
ansible-core 2.12 and there may be backwards incompatibilities in the
core playbook language.

How to get it
-------------

This pre-release is available on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

```
$ pip install ansible==6.6.0 --user
```

The sources for this release can be found here:

Release tarball:
https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/a/ansible/ansible-6.6.0.tar.gz
SHA256: e1b940a8d4f412123ede3c14b25cb99c3c8a4d535fd040aabf8e4fb7b0e4f092

Wheel package: https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/py3/a/ansible/ansible-6.6.0-py3-none-any.whl
SHA256: 3c6812e9af1c243b8a9e5fc6cba618449813765e609caae39a757452e2818dee

What's new in Ansible 6
---------------------------

* New command-line utility “ansible-community” is added in Ansible 6 to check the installed version of Ansible Community package.

```
$ ansible-community --version
Ansible community version 6.6.0
```

* Python wheels are now available for both Ansible 6 and ansible-core
2.13.x, resulting in significantly improved installation performance.

* In addition, Ansible 6 will no longer install some unnecessary files
from the included Ansible collections such as tests or hidden files &
directories in order to further improve installation performance and
reduce the size on disk. These files are still available in the source
tarball if necessary.

* The changelog for ansible-core 2.13 installed by this release of
ansible is available here:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.13/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.13.rst

* Collections which have opted into being a part of the Ansible-6
unified changelog will have an entry on this page:
https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/6/CHANGELOG-v6.rst

* For collections which have not opted into the unified changelog, you
may find more information on https://galaxy.ansible.com or their
source repository.
For example, the community.crypto collection would be found at
https://galaxy.ansible.com/community/crypto and you can find a link to
the source repository under the "Repo" button at the top right.

What's the schedule for new Ansible releases after 6.6.0 ?
---------------------------------------------------------

* Maintenance releases of Ansible 6.x will occur approximately every
three weeks (Ansible 6.6.0, Ansible 6.7.0, etc) until the release of
Ansible 7.0.0. They will contain bugfixes and new features but no
backwards incompatibilities.

* Please note that the release of ansible-core 2.13 coincides with the end-of-life of ansible 2.9 and ansible-base 2.10:
https://groups.google.com/g/ansible-announce/c/kegIH5_okmg/

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

A unified porting guide for collections which have opted-in is available here:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/porting_guides/porting_guide_6.html

Getting collection updates from Ansible 6 with older releases of ansible-core
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Ansible 6 includes ansible-core 2.13.x and users have expressed an interest
in getting collection updates as they ship in the Ansible "batteries
included" package while keeping an older version of ansible-core based
on their needs and requirements.

An ansible-galaxy requirements file based on the collections from
Ansible 6 has been made available for this use case:
https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/6/galaxy-requirements.yaml

Once the requirements file has been downloaded, the collections can be
installed by running:
"ansible-galaxy collection install -r galaxy-requirements.yaml"

On behalf of the Ansible community, thank you and happy automating!