New release candidate: ansible 2.9.15rc1 and 2.8.17rc1

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the release candidate of Ansible 2.9.15rc1
and 2.8.17rc1 are now available!

This is a release candidate that you can use for testing the next
available minor release of ansible.

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

$ pip install ansible==2.9.15rc1 --user
or
$ pip install ansible==2.8.17rc1 --user

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

* 2.9.15rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.15rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: e999da5e1e45211ddd1cfb1d7a05e25e23305243c6f1a9140c3cfdd981a17858
* 2.8.17rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.8.17rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: 5312ad174fb5b8cfc73d66188372a72e3c08e9dcf4f14123e24f616a7b9f2592


What's new in 2.9.15rc1 and 2.8.17rc1
-------------------------------------

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

* 2.9.15rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst
* 2.8.17rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.8/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.8.rst


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


The general availability version of these release candidates will be
available one week from now, on Monday, November 2.

Three weeks after that, the next RC will be available.


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 2.9.15rc1, 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