AnsibleByExample

Ansible 14.3.1 Released - Symlink Loop Fix in infinidat.infinibox

Beginner
2024-01-013By Luca Berton

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  2. 2. Installing and Configuring Ansible
  3. 3. Running Ad-Hoc Commands
  4. 4. Writing Your First Playbook
  5. 5. Understanding and Using Modules
  6. 6. Variables and Facts
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  13. 13. Real-World Automation Examples
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Introduction

Ansible 14.3.1 is a targeted patch release of the community package, published on 2026-08-14. It follows Ansible 14.3.0 and addresses a single, specific packaging bug rather than introducing any new functionality. Anyone running 14.3.0 in production should read this before deciding whether to upgrade, since the issue affects the size and integrity of the installed package.

What Changed From 14.3.0

Ansible 14.3.1 ships the exact same ansible-core version as 14.3.0, ansible-core 2.21.3. Only one collection was bumped compared to the previous release:

CollectionAnsible 14.3.0Ansible 14.3.1Notes
infinidat.infinibox1.8.41.8.5No machine-readable changelog provided by the collection maintainers

Every other collection in the bundle is unchanged between 14.3.0 and 14.3.1.

The Bug Being Fixed

The infinidat.infinibox 1.8.4 release included in Ansible 14.3.0 contained a recursive symlink loop inside its package tree. When setuptools built the sdist/wheel, it followed that loop instead of erroring out, and for unknown reasons it expanded the loop 41 levels deep before stopping. The practical result was that the Ansible 14.3.0 release ended up containing many duplicate copies of the infinidat.infinibox collection, inflating the package size.

infinidat.infinibox 1.8.5, shipped in Ansible 14.3.1, is functionally identical to 1.8.4 in terms of modules and plugins: the only difference is that the symlink loop has been removed from the source tree, so the resulting package is built correctly without duplication.

Whats New

There is no new module, plugin, or feature in this release. The sole change is the collection bump described above, which resolves the packaging defect. Users who already installed 14.3.0 and never noticed installation size/time issues are not required to upgrade for functional reasons, but the smaller, correctly-built package is the recommended target going forward.

Bugfixes

  • infinidat.infinibox bumped from 1.8.4 to 1.8.5, removing a recursive symlink loop that caused setuptools to duplicate the collection contents up to 41 levels deep in Ansible 14.3.0.

Installing and Verifying Ansible 14.3.1

# Install or upgrade to Ansible 14.3.1 in a virtual environment
python3 -m venv ansible-venv
source ansible-venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install ansible==14.3.1

# Verify the installed version and ansible-core version
ansible --version

# Confirm the infinidat.infinibox collection version bundled
ansible-galaxy collection list | grep infinidat

# Optional: inspect installed package size to confirm no duplication
pip show -f ansible | grep infinibox | wc -l

Expected output should show ansible-core 2.21.3 and infinidat.infinibox 1.8.5. If the infinibox file count from the last command looks unusually high on an existing 14.3.0 install, that confirms the symlink duplication described above, and reinstalling with 14.3.1 should resolve it.

Conclusion

Ansible 14.3.1 is a narrow, single-purpose patch release. Its only substantive change is the infinidat.infinibox bump from 1.8.5, which fixes a build-time symlink loop that bloated the previous release. Users managing Infinidat InfiniBox storage through Ansible, or anyone concerned about clean package builds, should move to 14.3.1.

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