Cached / Vaulted Version Freeze?

[lethedata]

Due to the constant churn of dependent projects, would there be any appetite to rework the examples into using cached/vaulted repos, OS, tools, etc?

This would help provide examples that "just work" regardless of the current state of upstream projects allowing students to learn and understand the concepts rather than wasting time trying to understand and fix broken plays due to out of date tooling. IMO the value comes from the concepts and seeing them in action, not necessarily that they are the most up to date.

Also, if these labs were released in a way that matched with specific book versions, this would help keep all versions of the book useful.

Below are some issues that occur before ever getting through chapter 4. They aren't really the easiest issues to identify unless one has a solid understanding of what's been happening upstream to cause the errors.

• Newer versions of Ansible (2.17+) don't work on the RHEL / Rocky / CentOS 8 #589
• Ubuntu 20.04 not supported by ppa:ondrej/php #617

Implementation Ideas

• Single VM with nested virtualization support to ignore reliance on host system for ansible and vagrant version. Vagrant boxes could be cached already avoiding the need to pull anything down.
• For a fully offline experience, the "host VM" could also contain and serve the cached/vault repos.
• Hosted vault repos so VMs still need internet access but pull from this hosted repo rather than upstream.

[lethedata]

I'm happy to try to help work on something like this but would need some guidance on what direction to go.

IMO, I think the easiest way to start is by reworking everything to the most up-to-date supported versions of things, then work on the caching process