Ansible 5.4.0 has been released

[David Moreau Simard]

Hi all,

We're happy to announce that the Ansible 5.4.0 package has been released !

Ansible 5.4.0 includes ansible-core 2.12 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 4.x which included
ansible-core 2.11 and there may be backwards incompatibilities in the
core playbook language.

Please see the porting guide (linked at the bottom) for details.

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

Due to a limitation in pip, if you are upgrading from Ansible 3 (or
earlier), you need to uninstall ansible and ansible-base before
installing Ansible 5:

```
$ pip uninstall ansible ansible-base
$ pip install ansible==5.4.0 --user
```

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

Ansible 5.4.0: https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/a/ansible/ansible-5.4.0.tar.gz
SHA256: 2f0ecbd8a3232e520bf3e3bc23f40dda60b9ce7924ca194bd35f4de4027100fc

What's new in Ansible 5.4.0
---------------------------

* The changelog for ansible-core 2.12 installed by this release of
ansible is available here:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.12/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.12.rst

* Collections which have opted into being a part of the Ansible-5
unified changelog will have an entry on this page:
https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/5/CHANGELOG-v5.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 5.4.0 ?
---------------------------------------------------------

* Maintenance releases of Ansible 5.x will occur approximately every
three weeks (Ansible 5.5.0, Ansible 5.6.0, etc) until the release of
Ansible 6.0.0. They will contain bugfixes and new features but no
backwards incompatibilities.

* Except for ansible-2.9.x, older versions of ansible are no longer
seeing maintenance releases. If there is a desire for maintenance
releases of older versions, drop by a Community Working Group Meeting
to discuss how you can help:
https://github.com/ansible/community/tree/main/meetings#wednesdays

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_5.html

Getting collection updates from Ansible 5 with ansible-core 2.11.x
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Ansible 5 includes ansible-core 2.12.x which has raised the minimum
python requirement to python>=3.8 and users have expressed an interest
in getting collection updates as they ship in Ansible 5 while keeping
ansible-core 2.11.x which still supports python>=2.7.
An ansible-galaxy requirements file based on the collections from
Ansible 5 has been made available for this use case:
https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/5/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 !