apt module reporting changes when there are none

[Jeff Geerling]

In my Git role on Galaxy, I have the following task to install certain packages on Debian hosts:

- name: Ensure git's dependencies are installed (Debian).

  apt: "pkg={{ item }} state=installed"

  with_items:

    - libcurl4-gnutls-dev

    - libexpat1-dev

    - gettext

    - libz-dev

    - libssl-dev

    - build-essential

This task always reports a change, even when no new packages are installed... below is the full output when running the playbook with -vvvv (you can see the full playbook run, twice, on an Ubuntu 12.04 host, over on Travis CI):

TASK: [ansible-role-git | Ensure git's dependencies are installed (Debian).] *** 
<localhost> REMOTE_MODULE apt pkg=libcurl4-gnutls-dev,libexpat1-dev,gettext,libz-dev,libssl-dev,build-essential state=installed
<localhost> EXEC ['/bin/sh', '-c', 'mkdir -p $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578 && chmod a+rx $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578 && echo $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578']
<localhost> PUT /tmp/tmpUu6LUb TO /home/travis/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578/apt
<localhost> EXEC /bin/sh -c 'sudo -k && sudo -H -S -p "[sudo via ansible, key=ptpgbfvujharlyicgqvfprtxbyzstkfo] password: " -u root /bin/sh -c '"'"'echo SUDO-SUCCESS-ptpgbfvujharlyicgqvfprtxbyzstkfo; LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 /usr/bin/python /home/travis/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578/apt; rm -rf /home/travis/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1408937381.71-7455986615578/ >/dev/null 2>&1'"'"''
changed: [localhost] => (item=libcurl4-gnutls-dev,libexpat1-dev,gettext,libz-dev,libssl-dev,build-essential) => {"changed": true, "item": "libcurl4-gnutls-dev,libexpat1-dev,gettext,libz-dev,libssl-dev,build-essential", "stderr": "", "stdout": "Reading package lists...\nBuilding dependency tree...\nReading state information...\nzlib1g-dev is already the newest version.\nThe following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:\n  git-man rsync liberror-perl libgeos-3.2.2\nUse 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.\n0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 128 not upgraded.\n"}

Any ideas as to why Ansible would be setting "changed" to true for this? Nothing was upgraded/installed/removed... Other apt tasks seem to work just fine.

[Brian Coca]

check if any of the packages is 'virtual'​

[Jeff Geerling]

That was exactly the problem; the `libz-dev` package was causing the false 'changed' status.

$ aptitude search libz-dev
v   libz-dev                                            -                                                              
v   libz-dev:i386                                       -   

Thanks!

[Brian Coca]

I've been looking at a good way to detect and prevent this, but end up with circular dependencies, if you have an idea on how to make detection work 'correctly' I'm willing to code it.

--
Brian Coca
Stultorum infinitus est numerus
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Pedo mellon a minno

[Jeff Geerling]

Short of adding in some regular expressions to detect whether there were changes in the apt stdout, I'm not sure of a way that you could do this easily—and without introducing a host of other bugs :/

[Michael DeHaan]

Perhaps there's a log to tail?

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[Brian Coca]

both of those would require major refactoring of the code, it only tries to install if it already considers a change as needed.

Brian Coca

[Michael DeHaan]

Timestamp the rpmdb... no, wait :)

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Brian Coca <bria...@gmail.com> wrote:

both of those would require major refactoring of the code, it only tries to install if it already considers a change as needed.

Brian Coca

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[Neech WORTHINGTON]

Did anybody find a solution to this, or was there an issue raised at all?

I think I might be experiencing this and would like to work around it if possible.