New release candidate: ansible-core 2.11.0rc2

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that ansible-core 2.11.0 release candidate 2 is
now available!

This new release candidate fixes a bug which primarily occurred on Python 3.5
and in many cases caused ansible to exit with the error: "ERROR! A worker was
found in a dead state"

--------------------------

Some information about ansible-core 2.11:

ansible-core 2.11 is a rename of ansible-base. As with ansible-base, it includes
only a minimal, vetted set of modules and plugins, and is extensible through the
use of Ansible Collections. This release of ansible-core includes some new
features and changes that we'd like to highlight below. This list is not
exhaustive:

- As of this release, Python 3.8 is now a *soft requirement* on the
controller. (This release will continue to work with the same versions of
Python as ansible-base 2.10, but ansible-core 2.12 will NOT)

- Role arguments can now be validated at runtime to ensure that roles are used
correctly

- ansible-galaxy now makes use of "resolvelib" for resolving dependencies

- New virtualization facts are now included (as lists), so that administrators
can see all virtual guest and host technologies available to the node

- Playbooks can now be run from collections

- For module authors, module_utils imports are now treated as optional if in
any nested block (such as 'try' or 'if') allowing for implementation of
fallback behavior for module_utils that do not exist in older versions of
Ansible.

We appreciate any and all early adopters and welcome any reports of issues on
GitHub. Happy testing!

--------------------------

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

$ pip install ansible-core==2.11.0rc2 --user

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

* ansible-core 2.11.0rc2
https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/a/ansible-core/ansible-core-2.11.0rc2.tar.gz
SHA256: d1e5503a307c0cdfa649241c7a1fae3c3dced107d5e676a939e002f0e23fe23d


What's new in ansible-core 2.11.0rc2
------------------------------------

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

* 2.11.0rc2
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.11/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.11.rst


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

* ansible-core 2.11.0 is set to release on 26 April 2021. There may be
additional release candidates published before this date as deemed necessary.

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

We've published a porting guide at
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-core/devel/porting_guides/porting_guide_core_2.11.html
to help migrate your content to 2.11.

If you discover any errors or if any of your working playbooks break when you
upgrade to 2.11.0rc2, 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 version that works and the one that
doesn't.

Thanks!

-Rick Elrod