On Ansible, part I: seems sloppy

You know how some developers are kind of code-jockeys? They do dodgy stuff with questionable ways.

Ansible devs write passwords to prompts that don't tell the username

In fact, if you want to make ansible to print out the username before ansible playbook runner requests passwords...

You cannot make ansible print username before password prompts

Yes, it is really that bad.

Yes, they really don't care for elementary stuff like that. The default setting for playbooks is to ask for "BECOME password", with no indication as to on which machine or which 'ansible_user.

And if you try to explicitly make your playbook print the value of computed username... guess what?

You can't.

Either the password is requested first, or username can be printed - no alternatives in ansible

Yes, it is truly as faulty as that. Who would ever think this is a valid approach? Some totally clueless low skill code-cowboy, probably.

I wanted to believe in Ansible project

Why would you ever request passwords without telling the user where and why, and which actual user?

And what else.

Everything is implicit in ansible

It is a horrible way to approach infra-automation. Everything should rather be explicit.

Just learning Ansible makes it seem attractive.

In a real project, automating your multi-machine infra with implicitly implied statements, and attempting to guess at which machine and which user Ansible playbooks are asking answers for, is bad.

Ansible playbooks are difficult to follow, and make for a kind of puzzle.

Finally, doing it this way is SLOW.

C'mon Ansible-project, this is totally suck.

Writing bash scripts would beat Ansible 6-3. Only thing it has going is the "shiny new thing".

Implementing your infra-automation with plain ruby scripts would be far, far more pleasurable, clear, readable and customizable.

I mean seriously, just using some javascript library would be far better, than using automation library that cares as little about their user, as to make it impossible to tell the user, which password is their "BECOME password" prompting for.

Save your time, choose something else

Ansible-project probably means well. It is probably fine for many projects. But it also comes with dysfunctions outlined above, built-in.

And with all this, Ansible makes bash-scripts look ergonomic, practical, effective and lightning fast, for automating your infra stuff.