First of all, congratulations to the team of Ansible and these tools have benefited us in numerous ways that cannot be understated.

Having said that, this caught my eye:

> There may be backwards incompatibilities in the core playbook language. Please see the porting guide for details.

Doing incompatible changes is not something specific to Ansible, for example Puppet has also done it time and again. We've been using both Ansible and Puppet in my previous job, and we always found it mildly annoying that upgrading a system (Linux, FreeBSD) would, in addition to the other "usual" dangers, bring along the danger of the new version not having a package for the "old" version of Puppet or Ansible that we were using. Which would force us to divert attention to the automation tool's problems instead of using the automation tool to solve problems.

I do understand that nothing can stand still and everything must evolve and change, but at some point this acquires the flavour of changes for the sake of changes. Especially when regressions happen and things that were working perfectly are now breaking, it is not exactly pleasant to have to devote time to them.

It's not exactly clear how can Perl programs or shell scripts or Makefiles from 20 years ago play perfectly fine unchanged, but the syntax of a manifest or playbook that does a couple of simple operations cannot remain stable. It's not like those tools were created yesterday, in which case it would be reasonable to expect changes in their first years.

if it was just incompatible syntax changes, that would be one thing. but it's not - it's incompatible administration and structure changes. they just stabilized the new modules shift a couple months ago, which restructured all their documentation and issue tracking, breaking uncountable links and closing thousands of open issues. and that wasn't the first time they'd done that.

at this point i've started transitioning as much of my administration stuff as i can away from ansible. there's some good stuff in their codebase, but it's easier for me to find it in the source code and copy-paste it into my own projects than it is for me to work within the ansible structure. ansible solved a lot of problems for us, but over the time we've been using it i'm pretty sure it's caused more problems than it's solved.

> at this point i've started transitioning as much of my administration stuff as i can away from ansible

Any preferred alternatives you can share?