New Ansible releases 2.9.16 and 2.8.18

[Rick Elrod]

Hi all- we're happy to announce that the general release of Ansible 2.9.16 and
2.8.18 are now available!


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

$ pip install ansible==2.9.16 --user
or
$ pip install ansible==2.8.18 --user

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

* 2.9.16
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.16.tar.gz
SHA256: 53a39a4df7010b279c5c7895558f8943b267e88d81488375aabf08e7b0633148
* 2.8.18
https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.8.18.tar.gz
SHA256: 694575dc2f076e3396757d7ffe0119fb5772041cbbb5520bd2d50a1a6f84b451


What's new in 2.9.16 and 2.8.18
-------------------------------

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

* 2.9.16
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.9/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.9.rst
* 2.8.18
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.8/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.8.rst


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

Given the upcoming holidays, the next set of release candidates is scheduled for
January 11th. The General Availability of those release candidates
will follow one week
later.


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 2.9.16, 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