Change of behavior in saved files (ansible-core 2.16 -> 2.17)

[dmsimard]

What is the issue ?

I found this out when updating integration test jobs to run 2.17 which was recently released: #553 (comment)

In the tests, both files are declared as vars_files:

ara/tests/integration/ignored_files.yaml

Lines 15 to 19 in 415b9c3

	vars_files:
	# This is encrypted with ansible vault
	- vars/vault.yaml
	# This contains secret data both in plain text and from ansible-vault (encrypted string)
	- vars/verysecret.yaml

Both vars_files are there in 2.16:

but they aren't in 2.17 (verysecret is missing):

I'm not sure whether this is a bug or intended from the perspective of ansible-core.

There's a lot of changes related to vars in the 2.17 changelog: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.17/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.17.rst

What should be happening ?

It could be that to reliably recover vars_files we need to go a layer deeper:

(Pdb) play._loader._FILE_CACHE["/home/dmsimard/tmp/ara/tests/integration/ignored_files.yaml"][0]["vars_files"]
['vars/vault.yaml', 'vars/verysecret.yaml']

But then it makes me wonder whether we should really recover vars files by default.
In fact, we should probably not save them by default since they are likely to contain sensitive information.

I'll leave this opened as a known issue for now.