State of Ansible

[maclover7]

As noted in #1272 (comment), would be ideal to get a current sense of a) the transition from setup to ansible, b) usability of the new scripts and how people feel about running them as well as making changes

[maclover7]

Here's what I've been able to gather and summarize from current/past happenings:

No workleave as is:
aix61 - needs manual attention from IBM falk anyway
centos5 - deprecated
www - leave on as an "in code" documentation of the status quo. Plan on re-architecting in the future.

PR Open:

PR Landed, more cleanup required:
windows -- can't use new scripts on any of the old machines

Completed:
armv7-wheezy
centos6
centos7
containers
cross-compiler
debian8
debian-wheezy-gcc
fedora20
fedora21
fedora22
freebsd
github-bot
linter
osx
raspberry-pi
rhel72-linuxonecc
smartos
ubuntu12.04
ubuntu14.04
ubuntu1604

[gdams]

@maclover7 macOS playbooks were created in #971

[maclover7]

@gdams Yep, but looks like setup/osx wasn't removed -- is that safe to do now?

[gdams]

I think so, I've pulled all of the useful stuff out of that playbook already

[maclover7]

@gdams Ok -- can you run the new playbook on all OSX machines, confirm everything looks okay, and then remove setup/osx if everything works good?

[rvagg]

• centos5: I think we can retire it all, Node 4's demise takes out our remaining need for it and it was getting crazy complicated keeping it alive (see non-ansible-configuration-notes.md details on git in centos5 for example)
• debian-wheezy-gcc: can disappear, not used and not useful anymore
• www: too big a job to migrate and I'm not convinced there's utility in migrating it since it's really just a reflection of reality and preparation for emergencies. If it needs to be relocated to clean out "setup" then that's fine by me.
• armv7-wheezy: "new scripts do not work due to awk error here; can old scripts be removed?" what's this referring to @maclover7? it can be removed anyway, the armv7 machines this references are running Ubuntu 16.04 and doing everything in Docker now.
• osx: we have scripts? it's just docs and a few helpers isn't it? they're redundant now with the new osx work.
• windows: I'm pretty sure is out of date but I don't believe we have anything better so it's important for documentation purposes at a minimum

As I look in setup/ all I see that I care about retaining now are windows and www. I'm not confident about aix61 and github-bot but you've covered them here. The rest can go IMO, even the ansible-* stuff and other top-level files.

[jbergstroem]

Regarding the www transfer: I have a 1 year old local branch that started addressing it. I ran into something and will have to revisit what that was.

[joaocgreis]

setup/windows should work, provided https://github.com/nodejs/build/blob/master/doc/non-ansible-configuration-notes.md is followed first. However, it has proven to be brittle in the past (#907), so I wouldn't be surprised if some small updates are needed because of changes in Ansible.

One notable thing missing is a script for Visual Studio 2017, I have a draft for that that needs some testing and I'll try to get it done soon.

I also plan to move the scripts to ansible/, probably will start by crating a new section in create.yml and then try to merge where possible. If someone else is working on this please let me know so we avoid duplicating the work. I'm also happy to help if there are questions.