I feel as though I do process lists via ansible. You could be less abstract and provide code. Otherwise, it is hard to take this complaint seriously.
Here we install Jenkins jobs....
- name: create the job config.xml files
sudo: true
template:
src={{ item }}
dest={{ conf_jenkins_home }}/jobs/{{ item | basename | replace(".xml.j2", "") }}/config.xml
owner=jenkins
group=jenkins
mode=0600
with_fileglob:
- ../templates/jobs/*
notify: restart Jenkins
- name: install sonar plugins
sudo: true
get_url:
url={{ item.value.url }}
dest=/opt/sonarqube/extensions/plugins
owner={{ ansible_ssh_user }}
group={{ ansible_ssh_user }}
mode=0755
with_dict: "{{ sonarqube_plugins }}"
No, I'm talking about any atbitrary list processing operation. Some combination of map, fold, and filter, for example.
So, in order to do that in an Ansible playbook, I need to write a Python function to do it and use it in the YAML file as a filter because the DSL isn't expressive enough to do it on its own. So... why wouldn't I want to just use Python again?