- file module - The touch subcommand had its diff output broken during the 2.6.x development cycle. The patch to fix that broke check mode. This is now fixed (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42111)
- inventory manager - This fixes required options being populated before the inventory config file is read, so the required options may be set in the config file.
- win_domain - fixes typo in one of the AD cmdlets https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41536
- win_group_membership - uses the internal Ansible SID conversion logic and uses that when comparing group membership instead of the name https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/40649
- Added an ``encoding`` option to the ``b64encode`` and ``b64decode`` filters to specify the encoding of the string that is base64 encoded.
- PowerShell modules that use Convert-ToSID in Ansible.ModuleUtils.SID.psm1 like win_user_right now accept an actual SID as an input string. This means any local or domain accounts that are named like a SID need to be prefixed with the domain, hostname, or . to ensure it converts to that accounts SID https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/38502
-`postgresql_user` module changed `encrypted=yes` to be the default. This shouldn't break any current playbooks, the module will just store passwords hashed by default. This change was done because Postgres 10 dropped support for `UNENCRYPTED` passwords and because all versions since Postgres 7.2 support storing encrypted passwords.
- postgresql_user module - Changed encrypted=yes to be the default. This shouldn't break any current playbooks, the module will just store passwords hashed by default. This change was done because Postgres 10 dropped support for UNENCRYPTED passwords and because all versions since Postgres 7.2 support storing encrypted passwords.
- vmware_target_canonical_facts module - The target_id parameter is an optional parameter.
- nxos_igmp_interface module - The oif_prefix and oif_source properties are deprecated. Use the oif_ps parameter with a dictionary of prefix and source to values instead.
-**Security Fix** - Some connection exceptions would cause no_log specified on a task to be ignored. If this happened, the task information, including any private information could have been displayed to stdout and (if enabled, not the default) logged to a log file specified in ansible.cfg's log_path. Additionally, sites which redirected stdout from ansible runs to a log file may have stored that private information onto disk that way as well. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41414)
- Changed the admin_users config option to not include "admin" by default as admin is frequently used for a non-privileged account (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41164)
- Changed the output to "text" for "show vrf" command as default "json" output format with respect to "eapi" transport was failing (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41470)
- Fix added for Digital Ocean Volumes API change causing Ansible to recieve an unexpected value in the response. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41431)
- Fix iosxr_config module to handle route-policy, community-set, prefix-set, as-path-set and rd-set blocks. All these blocks are part of route-policy language of iosxr.
- Fix mode=preserve with remote_src=True for the copy module
- Implement mode=preserve for the template module
- The yaml callback plugin now allows non-ascii characters to be displayed.
- Various grafana_* modules - Port away from the deprecated b64encodestring function to the b64encode function instead. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/38388
- copy - fixed copy to only follow symlinks for files in the non-recursive case
- copy module - The copy module was attempting to change the mode of files for remote_src=True even if mode was not set as a parameter. This failed on filesystems which do not have permission bits (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40099)
- dynamic includes - Allow inheriting attributes from static parents (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/38827)
- dynamic includes - Don't treat undefined vars for conditional includes as truthy (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39377)
- dynamic includes - Fix IncludedFile comparison for free strategy (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/37083)
- dynamic includes - Improved performance by fixing re-parenting on copy (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/38747)
- dynamic includes - Use the copied and merged task for calculating task vars (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39762)
- file - fixed the default follow behaviour of file to be true
- file module - Eliminate an error if we're asked to remove a file but something removes it while we are processing the request (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39466)
- file module - Fix error when recursively assigning permissions and a symlink to a nonexistent file is present in the directory tree (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39456)
- file module - Fix error when running a task which assures a symlink to a nonexistent file exists for the second and subsequent times (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39558)
- file module - The file module allowed the user to specify src as a parameter when state was not link or hard. This is documented as only applying to state=link or state=hard but in previous Ansible, this could have an effect in rare cornercases. For instance, "ansible -m file -a 'state=directory path=/tmp src=/var/lib'" would create /tmp/lib. This has been disabled and a warning emitted (will change to an error in Ansible-2.10).
- file module - The touch subcommand had its diff output broken during the 2.6.x development cycle. This is now fixed (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41755)
- fix BotoCoreError exception handling
- fix apt-mark on debian6 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41530)
- fix async for the aws_s3 module by adding async support to the action plugin (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40826)
- fix decrypting vault files for the aws_s3 module (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39634)
- fix errors with S3-compatible APIs if they cannot use ACLs for buckets or objects
- fix permission handling to try to download a file even if the user does not have permission to list all objects in the bucket
- fixed config required handling, specifically for _terms in lookups https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41740
- gce_net - Fix sorting of allowed ports (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41567)
- group_by - support implicit localhost (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41860)
- import/include - Ensure role handlers have the proper parent, allowing for correct attribute inheritance (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39426)
- import_playbook - Pass vars applied to import_playbook into parsing of the playbook as they may be needed to parse the imported plays (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39521)
- include_role/import_role - Don't overwrite included role handlers with play handlers on parse (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39563)
- include_role/import_role - Use the computed role name for include_role/import_role so to diffentiate between names computed from host vars (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39516)
- include_role/import_role - improved performance and recursion depth (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/36470)
- lineinfile - fix insertbefore when used with BOF to not insert duplicate lines (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/38219)
- password lookup - Do not load password lookup in network filters, allowing the password lookup to be overriden (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41907)
- powershell - use the tmpdir set by `remote_tmp` for become/async tasks instead of the generic $env:TEMP - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40210
- selinux - correct check mode behavior to report same changes as normal mode (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40721)
- spwd - With python 3.6 spwd.getspnam returns PermissionError instead of KeyError if user does not have privileges (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39472)
- synchronize - Ensure the local connection created by synchronize uses _remote_is_local=True, which causes ActionBase to build a local tmpdir (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40833)
- template - Fix for encoding issues when a template path contains non-ascii characters and using the template path in ansible_managed (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/27262)
- template action plugin - fix the encoding of filenames to avoid tracebacks on Python2 when characters that are not present in the user's locale are present. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39424)
- user - only change the expiration time when necessary (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/13235)
- win_environment - Fix for issue where the environment value was deleted when a null value or empty string was set - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/40450
- win_file - fix issue where special chars like [ and ] were not being handled correctly https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/37901
- win_get_url - fixed a few bugs around authentication and force no when using an FTP URL
- win_template - fix when specifying the dest option as a directory with and without the trailing slash https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39886
- win_updates - Added the ability to run on a scheduled task for older hosts so async starts working again - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/38364
- winrm - allow `ansible_user` or `ansible_winrm_user` to override `ansible_ssh_user` when both are defined in an inventory - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39844
- winrm - ensure pexpect is set to not echo the input on a failure and have a manual sanity check afterwards https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41865
- winrm connection plugin - Fix exception messages sometimes raising a traceback when the winrm connection plugin encounters an unrecoverable error. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39333
