Ansible-core 2.12

Release Schedule 

PRs must be raised well in advance of the dates below to have a chance of being included in this ansible-core release.

Note

There is no Alpha phase in 2.12.

Note

Dates subject to change.

2021-09-24 Feature Freeze (and stable-2.12 branching from devel) No new functionality (including modules/plugins) to any code
2021-09-27 Beta 1
2021-10-04 Beta 2 (if necessary)
2021-10-18 Release Candidate 1
2021-10-25 Release Candidate 2 (if necessary)
2021-11-08 Release

Ansible Core Team

Bump the minimum Python version requirement for the controller to Python 3.8. This will be a hard requirement.
Deprecate Python 2.6 support for managed/target hosts. The release of ansible-core==2.13 will remove Python 2.6 support.
Introduce split-controller testing in ansible-test to separate dependencies for the controller from dependencies on the target.
Extend the functionality of module_defaults action_groups to be created and presented by collections.

The following work has been delayed and retargeted for a future release

Implement object proxies, to expose restricted interfaces between parts of the code, and enable deprecations of attributes and variables.