[Server-devel] XSCE Ansible Restructuring

[Tim Moody]

On Thursday's call I promised to send out some ideas on restructuring the 
XSCE ansible playbooks.

The current top-level playbook, xsce.yml runs the following:

•    common
•    network
•    gateway
•    core
•    xsce-addons

I propose to change this to

•    1-preliminaries
This is mostly a rename of common to reflect its broader role than just 
installing common packages.

•    2-platform
This is a home for platform-specific preprocessing.  Today this is only 
xo.yml, but later could include cubox, etc.

•    3-base-server
This is basic networking and gateway where appropriate as well as httpd, and 
samba, that is a working web and file server.  I would also put php, and 
database packages here.  Eventually a configuration gui would go here that 
determines what gets installed next.

•    4-xo-services
This is idmgr, etc.  Today ejabberd belongs here.

•    5-edu-apps
This is moodle, iiab, etc.

•    6-mgmt-tools
These are the statistics, monitoring, and management applications.

•    7-local-addons
This is a home for additional playbooks particular to a specific deployment.

The reason for the change is to make the aggregate roles map more closely to 
the features page, to clarify the function of these roles, and to separate 
educational from management applications.  Each role has a number prefix so 
that they appear at the top of the directory listing for roles.

Some of the aggregate roles currently use includes in main.yml and some use 
the meta functionality.  Meta is really meant for dependencies, whereas we 
use it for includes, so I think we should use includes for everything.  This 
will allow us to add a when clause that will make installation/enablement 
dependent on the value of a variable, another step towards a configuration 
gui.

Tim