validate-modules for plugins: author: required with same conditions as for modules, or optional, or other conditions?

[felixfontein]

SUMMARY

This is not a bug, but a discussion issue for one aspect of #71734 ([WIP] Extend validate-modules to also validate plugins). It provides details on one of the points in ansible/community#560 (comment).

For modules, the author field is required to follow a very specific form:

ansible/test/lib/ansible_test/_data/sanity/validate-modules/validate_modules/schema.py

Lines 25 to 32 in d63d880

	# Valid DOCUMENTATION.author lines
	# Based on Ansibulbot's extract_github_id()
	# author: First Last (@name) [optional anything]
	# "Ansible Core Team" - Used by the Bot
	# "Michael DeHaan" - nop
	# "OpenStack Ansible SIG" - OpenStack does not use GitHub
	# "Name (!UNKNOWN)" - For the few untraceable authors
	author_line = re.compile(r'^\w.*(\(@([\w-]+)\)|!UNKNOWN)(?![\w.])|^Ansible Core Team$|^Michael DeHaan$|^OpenStack Ansible SIG$')

This is not followed by plugins (since they were not validated). Some plugins have no author entry at all, others have unsupported strings (Ericsson IPOS OAM team for cliconf plugin community.network.eric_eccli, the ansible.builtin.varnames lookup has Ansible Core, ...).

I would suggest to use the same rules as for modules, i.e. require the authors field and use the same validation as for modules.

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

ansible-test validate-modules

ANSIBLE VERSION

2.11

bot_skip

[sivel]

!component =test/lib/ansible_test/_data/sanity/validate-modules/validate_modules/main.py

[samdoran]

Per discussion today, the author string should be uniformly enforced across modules and plugins. Plugins that fail this validation should be fixed.

[jborean93]

Closing as per the above comment.