Release announcement : Ansible Community Package 7.4.0

[Anwesha Das]

Hello everyone,

We're happy to announce the release of the Ansible 7.4.0 package!

Ansible 7.4.0 includes ansible-core 2.14.4 as well as a curated set of
Ansible collections that provide a vast number of modules and plugins.

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

This release is available on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

`$ python3 -m pip install ansible==7.4.0 --user`

The sources for this release can be found here:

Release tarball:
https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/a/ansible/ansible-7.4.0.tar.gz

SHA256:
0964d6ec7b363d2d559f245c39b01798c720a85b207672ec2c9d83cf61564b90

Wheel package: https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/py3/a/ansible/ansible-7.4.0-py3-none-any.whl

SHA256:
c9b5cae2ff8168b3dc859fff12275338cd7c84ef37f62889076f82846bb4beb5

What's new in Ansible 7
--------------------------

Python wheels are now available for both Ansible 7 and ansible-core
2.14.x, resulting in significantly improved installation performance.

In addition, Ansible 7 no longer installs some unnecessary files from
the included Ansible collections such as tests or hidden files and
directories to further improve installation performance and reduce the
size on disk. These files are still available in the source tarball if
necessary.

The changelog for ansible-core 2.14 installed by this release of
Ansible 7 is available here:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.14/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.14.rst

Collections which have opted-in to being a part of the Ansible 7
unified changelog will have an entry on this page:
https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/7/CHANGELOG-v7.rst

For collections which have not opted-in to the unified changelog, you
may find more information on https://galaxy.ansible.com or the
collection source repository. For example, the community.crypto
collection is available at https://galaxy.ansible.com/community/crypto
and you can find a link to the source repository under the "Repo"
button at the top right.

What's the schedule for new Ansible releases after 7.4.0?
---------------------------------------------------------

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

A unified porting guide for collections that have opted-in is available here:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/porting_guides/porting_guide_7.html

Getting collection updates from Ansible 7 with older releases of ansible-core
--------------------------------------

Ansible 7 includes ansible-core 2.14.x. Based on your requirements,
you can get collection updates as they ship in the Ansible "batteries
included" package while continuing to use older versions of
ansible-core.

An ansible-galaxy requirements file based on the collections from
Ansible 7 has been made available for this use case:
https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/7/galaxy-requirements.yaml

After you download the requirements file, the collections can be
installed by running this command:

"ansible-galaxy collection install -r galaxy-requirements.yaml"

On behalf of the Ansible community, thank you and happy automating!

Cheers
Anwesha