Before this minor change, the '--limit' and '--start-at-task'
ansible-playbook command line arguments were enclosed into single
quotes. Using double quotes adds a bit more flexibility, especially
about the task name referred by `start_at_task` option.
It also aligns with the handling of the '--extra-vars' parameter
(see cb80286).
Without this change, the JSON string generated from the `extra_vars`
Ruby hash is passed without enclosing quotes and is then not parseable
by the ansible-playbook command when exectuted in a usual shell context.
In this changeset, the ansible (remote) unit test coverage is improved
to cover both usage of `extra_vars` (ansible_local unit tests are still
missing).
Additional Notes:
- Double quotes are favored to single quotes in order to allow usage of
any character for the variable values. For this reason additional
escaping is appended to JSON-inner double quotes and backslashes.
- This problem was not affecting the `ansible` remote provisioner
(which is running the ansible-playbook command via the childprocess
Ruby library). But with this change, the `verbose` output will also
now be correct for a copy-paste reuse.
- After this change, all the "--extra-vars" arguments (also a var
file passed with the @-syntax or anything coming via the
`raw_arguments` option) are "blindly" and systematically enclosed
in double quoted and double-escaped.
This is not optimal and can potentially break with peculiar values
(e.g. a double quote character (") cannot be used in a json value
when using `raw_arguments`). That said, I think that the current
solution is a reasonable trade-off, since the official `extra_vars`
option should now be able to cover a great majority of use cases.
Fix#6726
With this change, the existing host-based Ansible provisioner is
refactored to share a maximum of code with this new guest-based Ansible
provisioner.
At this stage of development, the existing unit tests are intentionally
modified as little as possible, to keep safe the existing funtionalities.
Other issues resolved by this changeset:
- Display a warning when running from a Windows host [GH-5292]
- Do not run `ansible-playbook` in verbose mode when the `verbose` option
is set to an empty string.