New Ansible release candidates 2.9.18rc1 and 2.8.19rc1

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the general release of Ansible 2.9.18rc1
and 2.8.19rc1 are now available!

These are release candidates of ansible made available for user testing and
testing in CI environments.

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==2.9.18rc1 --user
or
$ pip install ansible==2.8.19rc1 --user

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

* 2.9.18rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.18rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: 10c018d7f3d397f7ed02ccd1176b283ff732dc1d794ec58362d2167e40dec752
* 2.8.19rc1
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.8.19rc1.tar.gz
SHA256: af2b3b68dda7e558bb6fbe174f760f734150f1cb81716cd81bb52cfa7492ea85


What's new in 2.9.18rc1 and 2.8.19rc1
-------------------------------------

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

* 2.9.18rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst
* 2.8.19rc1
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.8/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.8.rst


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

This Release Candidate is scheduled to become a General Availability
release in one week.


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 2.9.18rc1, 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