Internals/Core
* internal inventory API now more object oriented, parsers decoupled
* async handling improvements
* misc fixes for running ansible on OS X (overlord only)
* sudo improvements, now works much more smoothly
* sudo to a particular user with -U/--sudo-user, or using 'sudo_user: foo' in a playbook
* --private-key CLI option to work with pem files
Inventory
* can use -i host1,host2,host3:port to specify hosts not in inventory (replaces --override-hosts)
* ansible INI style format can do groups of groups [groupname:children] and group vars [groupname:vars]
* groups and users module takes an optional system=yes|no on creation (default no)
* list of hosts in playbooks can be expressed as a YAML list in addition to ; delimited
Playbooks
* variables can be replaced like ${foo.nested_hash_key.nested_subkey[array_index]}
* unicode now ok in templates (assumes utf8)
* able to pass host specifier or group name in to "hosts:" with --extra-vars
* ansible-pull script and example playbook (extreme scaling, remediation)
* inventory_hostname variable available that contains the value of the host as ansible knows it
* variables in the 'all' section can be used to define other variables based on those values
* 'group_names' is now a variable made available to templates
* first_available_file feature, see selective_file_sources.yml in examples/playbooks for info
* --extra-vars="a=2 b=3" etc, now available to inject parameters into playbooks from CLI
Incompatible Changes
* jinja2 is only usable in templates, not playbooks, use $foo instead
* --override-hosts removed, can use -i with comma notation (-i "ahost,bhost")
* modules can no longer include stderr output (paramiko limitation from sudo)
Module Changes
* tweaks to SELinux implementation for file module
* fixes for yum module corner cases on EL5
* file module now correctly returns the mode in octal
* fix for symlink handling in the file module
* service takes an enable=yes|no which works with chkconfig or updates-rc.d as appropriate
* service module works better on Ubuntu
* git module now does resets and such to work more smoothly on updates
* modules all now log to syslog
* enabled=yes|no on a service can be used to toggle chkconfig & updates-rc.d states
* git module supports branch=
* service fixes to better detect status using return codes of the service script
* custom facts provided by the setup module mean no dependency on Ruby, facter, or ohai
* service now has a state=reloaded
* raw module for bootstrapping and talking to routers w/o Python, etc
Misc Bugfixes
* fixes for variable parsing in only_if lines
* misc fixes to key=value parsing
* variables with mixed case now legal
* fix to internals of hacking/test-module development script