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by dnautics 2046 days ago
> then your playbooks are 99% of the time simple YAML lists and dicts.

But really, that's not the problem. The problem is when you inherit someone else's playbook that is itself trying to do a hackjob around a community playbook.
1 comments
geerlingguy 2046 days ago
When you inherit any code, it's always a mess, at least that's my experience. Sometimes a working mess, but it's rare to inherit nice code in any system.

I could be biased since I've worked mostly with Python, Ruby, PHP, and Java.

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dnautics 2046 days ago
of course, but debugging ansible YAML is exceptionally hard on account of the difficulty of decoding its quasi-declarative, quasi-imperative nature, the difficulty of knowing what the variables to be interpolated are (they could have been changed by other playbooks!), etc. You'll want at the very least a sane set of debug tools to figure things out when they go wrong.

The other alternative is to just give up and rewrite the ansible script, which has been what I had to do on several occasions.

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