Current practice for setting ansible_python_interpreter based on group_by: key={{ansible_distribution}}

[Darren S.]

ansible 2.3.1.0
python 2.7.14


I'm just wondering the best approach to handling a multi-OS
environment where python interpreters are located at different paths:

Linux:
/usr/bin/python

OpenBSD, FreeBSD
/usr/local/bin/python

macOS w/Homebrew
/usr/local/bin/python2

...and ansible_python_interpreter needs to be overridden on a large
part of the environment.


In this deployment I strongly want to use the approach like in [1] to
group hosts by OS using ansible_distribution fact, so I want to avoid
static declarations in inventory files and would like this to be able
to be specified in something like group_vars/Linux,
group_vars/OpenBSD, etc. leveraging ansible_distribution groupings.

Is there a way to achieve this? Or is it a chicken and egg problem
that requires inventory specifications because the
ansible_distribution cannot be known prior to invoking Python?

[1] https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples/blob/master/language_features/group_by.yml

--
Darren Spruell
phatb...@gmail.com