Ansible - Different OS Version on Control & Managed Node

[Trevor]

Hello Community,

I was running a playbook on a control node with RhEL 8.7, against a managed node
with RHEL  9.  The playbook ran fine, but provided me the following warning:

[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Distribution rhel 9.0 on host node1 should use /usr/libexec/platform-python, but is using /usr/bin/python for backward compatibility
with prior Ansible releases.  A future Ansible release will default to using the
discovered platform python for this host.  See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.9/reference_appendices/interpreter_discovery.html
for more information. This feature will be removed in version 2.12. Deprecation warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.

One approach to take, to bring things up-to-date, is to adjust an entry in the 
/etc/ansible/ansible.cfg file:     

[defaults]
interpreter_python=auto

No big thing, but you'll have to add that key (interpreter_python) to the file - it doesn't
already exist.  And the value needs to be "auto".  Place this entry in the [defaults] section
of the "ansible.cfg" file, and the warning goes away.  Of course, you can always turn off
all warnings altogether - although I wouldn't recommend doing so!

Happy Wonderful Wednesday!!!

[Fran_Garcia]

Hey Trevor,

Some addenda .  You are facing this issue because the system has a configured /usr/bin/python version.

After the python2 deprecation, in RHEL8 /usr/bin/python no longer points to a specific python version, as administrators/developers need to ensure their python code is compatible with whatever python version is available in the system (you might choose a default python version with alternatives --config python). 

In the case of RHEL 9, you can remove the "python-unversioned-command" package and gets rid of this behaviour (no need to run alternatives --config).

HTH

Fran