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Ansible galaxy concept is great as it supposed to promote playbook reuse.

Still because it lacks any serious filtering or curating methods it became a victim of its own success: there are too many options to pick from and most of them (if not all) being incomplete, obsolete or without a community behind them.

Ansible galaxy reminds me a little bit about Jenkins plugins, another place where too many options is worse than having less.

Do you know a way to deal with this problem? How we should approach this issue.

I would love to contribute to incomplete roles, but with the current state of affairs it seems impossible to know which one to worth any attention.

030
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sorin
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1 Answers1

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There are a couple of different approaches to this. https://galaxy.ansible.com/explore/ shows you a couple of different criteria by which to browse available roles. "Most Downloaded" are obviously the most popular, which means they are either the most complete and/or are being constantly maintained. Similarly with "Most Starred" list.

You can also browse roles from the most prolific role authors. Generally those people spend a lot of time writing their roles, so they tend to be up-to-date and follow good practices. If that's not enough, you can simply look at the last update timestamp of a role you are interested in. If it's been a couple of months since the last update, perhaps it's been abandoned.

For common tasks there will be a lot of similar roles, so look at the most popular ones. For more esoteric stuff your options would be more limited and easier to narrow down good candidates.

Mxx
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  • Sorry but I already tried this approach. Imagining that the right answer will just "emerge" from the galaxy soup just by looking at these metrics is hopeless. I tried for basic things and failed. The main problem is that galaxy does not encourage collaboration on the same playbooks, now is very individualistic. There are two major problems that needs to be addressed: manual curation by some admins that could tag some playbooks as "official" or "verified" (like tweeter). 2nd would be to build one or more groups (organizations) that do maintain the "good" roles. – sorin Feb 28 '16 at 09:28
  • Well, Galaxy actually only is a repository github links, not more. So for the collaboration or organization part, it's all there on the github side. It's just that a role can only be published from a single account. – udondan Feb 29 '16 at 03:15
  • I don't think it is a good idea or even possible to have a few people who might not be able to use the role in the correct way due to missing machines of the correct architecture or what not to decide if a role is good or not. This should be all in the community hands. – udondan Feb 29 '16 at 03:19
  • Galaxy indeed has missing features there. At minimum there should be a way for users to flag a role, which may indicate it is broken. Other ideas (which mostly are borrowed from the [Atmosphere roadmap](https://trello.com/c/ivKqFfjc/6-atmosphere-score-v2)) is adding an advanced calculated scoring based on github activity like ratio of open/closed issues, number of contributers, commit activity, ... – udondan Feb 29 '16 at 03:22
  • Galaxy is a work in progress. They themselves realize it's shortcomings and are working on some solutions. Puppet's Mcollective apparently faces similar problems. – Mxx Feb 29 '16 at 04:24
  • `Page Not Found` – 030 Dec 29 '18 at 11:53