Support for Ansible 2.9 and ansible-base 2.10 will be dropped in version 3.0.0

[briantist]

SUMMARY

Following the guidance and announcements in ansible-community/community-topics#50 we will drop support for Ansible 2.9 and ansible-base 2.10, in version 3.0.0 of the collection, to be released around May 2022.

This follows on the EOL of those versions, and will coincide with the release of ansible-core 2.13, followed by the Ansible 6 package release.

---

What this means

• no specific functionality has been removed or dropped with this change
• tests will no longer be run against the EOL versions, so any new changes could potentially break 2.9 or 2.10 support; we will not know this is the case before merging
• PR authors will not be required to support those versions; a reviewer may spot something glaring and suggest an alternative though, those should at least be considered
• PRs that seek to make something in main work with an EOL version will be considered as long as:
  • it does not break or otherwise hinder functionality or performance for non-EOL versions
  • it adds minimal or no additional maintainer burden
  • it has full (100%) test coverage: the lack of running against 2.9/2.10 in CI means that those code paths may not be hit naturally in CI, however that must be worked around (probably with unit tests) to be accepted

Please use Discussions if you want to discuss, request, or submit such a change.