New Ansible releases 2.8.17 and 2.9.15

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the general release of Ansible 2.8.17 and
2.9.15 are now available!


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

$ pip install ansible==2.8.17 --user
or
$ pip install ansible==2.9.15 --user

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

* 2.8.17
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.8.17.tar.gz
SHA256: 31bb4e06d08d8b384bf027dd214c8c74cad2909fd9a14e7c9da90cff7d10f68a
* 2.9.15
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.15.tar.gz
SHA256: 736a19fa6d608b4df2d6b48d31fec057b3f95abf62b7fda69ffa4a743e2f55b6


What's new in 2.8.17 and 2.9.15
-------------------------------

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

* 2.8.17
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.8/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.8.rst
* 2.9.15
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst


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

In normal circumstances, you could expect the next release candidate 3 weeks
from today. However, due to the US Thanksgiving holiday, we are going to push
this next release cycle out an extra week.

Thus, you can expect the next release candidates to be November 30, 2020. The
general availability releases will follow one week later as usual.


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 2.9.15, 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