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It seems reasonable to have distinct tags for , , and , as they are fundamentally different features/areas of the Ansible family.

The Tag by itself is unnecessary -- any post with this tag should also have .

It is like having separate tags for , , and , much too granular. It does not make sense to have a separate tag for questions that are playbook related.

The precedent for this exists with and the symbolic-tag . Shouldn't the same work for ?

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  • So, a downvote and not even a comment why? That's helpful... :P
    – 0xSheepdog
    Commented Dec 28, 2019 at 1:36

2 Answers 2

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I believe I suggested a while ago to mark ansible-playbook as a synonym of ansible but the suggestion didn't receive enough votes.

While I believe that, strictly technical speaking, ansible, ansible-playbook and ansible-galaxy are distinct tools, it does not seem practical to use tags to distinguish between those any further. No relevant amount people on SF is only watching one of those subtags. For example almost no question tagged with ansible-playbook doesn't also have the ansible tag. It appears to me that the tags are practically synonyms.

From my perspective the root cause of this situation is that it is too easy to create a new tag and way too hard to get rid of useless tags. Way too hard in terms of tags having the potential of being a useful tool for a community the size of SF.

It is not fruitful to ask if there is a technical distinction. It is useful to check if people can and do distinguish accurately. And in this case it is, looking at the data, pretty obvious that people don't do so.

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My (extremely) understanding of the Ansible ecosystem is that "Ansible" by itself most properly refers to the entire suite of Ansible-related tools, with most people understanding that saying "ansible" by itself in an appropriate context refers to the playbook tool, for backwards-compatibility purposes. If that's a correct understanding, would it make more sense instead to blacklist and require people to use the appropriate more-specific tag in all cases?

I'm a fan of tag cleanups, so whichever way works best I'm all in favour. Just a matter of determining which way makes the most sense.

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  • So "Ansible" is the name of the software but also the executable command and the most basic form of the tool. That basic tool is used in "Ad Hoc" mode which works great, but really isn't useful for large sweeping operations in the way Ansible is usually discussed and considered. Technically, that command is "ansible-playbook", and requires the user provide a .YAML formatted file, the 'playbook'. Ansible-tower is the enterprise automation framework and GUI that runs ansible-playbook, and Galaxy is the "docker hub" of ansible roles/plays that others have written and shared.
    – 0xSheepdog
    Commented Dec 28, 2019 at 5:42
  • (continued). Using the tags this way is like having separate tags for python commands directly versus writing python code into a file and executing that script. Do we need separate tags in that scenario? If not, why do we do it for Ansible?
    – 0xSheepdog
    Commented Dec 28, 2019 at 5:43
  • Sorry, I'm not feeling like you're making your case. If "ansible" is a recognisable separate thing from "ansible-playbook", then perhaps both tags should stay, but with improved descriptions as to when each is applicable?
    – womble Mod
    Commented Dec 28, 2019 at 6:37

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