New Ansible releases 2.8.19 and 2.9.18

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the general release of Ansible 2.8.19 and
2.9.18 are now available!

A full listing of changes found in this release can be found in the
changelog linked below. Of note, this release addresses the following
*security vulnerabilities*:

* CVE-2021-20228 where default and fallback values for no_log parameters
to modules were not previously masked.

* CVE-2021-20178 where several parameters to the snmp_facts module were
logged and displayed despite containing sensitive information.

* CVE-2021-20180 where several parameters to the
bitbucket_pipeline_variable were logged and displayed despite
containing sensitive information.

* CVE-2021-20191 which addresses a number of modules whose parameters
were logged and displayed despite containing sensitive
information. For the full list of affected modules, refer to the
changelog linked below.



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

$ pip install ansible==2.8.19 --user
or
$ pip install ansible==2.9.18 --user

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

* 2.8.19
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.8.19.tar.gz
SHA256: dc75eee0c20597fad6569d10e8ab0d9ba5e64f3be4403b06b1627efab6635203
* 2.9.18
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.18.tar.gz
SHA256: 55fee77729eab2dce854c94a7b6998f0fcb7b9a053bdaa7eb4057f01a0d5d93c


What's new in 2.8.19 and 2.9.18
-------------------------------

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

* 2.8.19
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.8/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.8.rst
* 2.9.18
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst


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

The next set of release candidates are scheduled for 8 March 2021.
General-availability releases of those release candidates are planned for one
week thereafter.


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 2.9.18, 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