Peculiar handlers

Ansible bingo got replenishment

If you don’t know, I have a project called ‘ansible bingo’ [1]. It’s a small collection of the most hilarious not-a-bugs-or-bugs in Ansible, mostly around the way Jinja expressions are handled.

Yesterday I made another addition there: circular handlers. I can’t explain the result and it’s jaw-dropping. To the respect, one of my colleagues was able to predict result (without running the code) after 5th guess (but not the actual number).

The code:

---
- name: How many times handler h2 will be called? Why?
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - debug: msg=start
      changed_when: true
      notify: h1
  handlers:
    - name: h1
      debug: msg=hander1
      changed_when: true
      notify: h2
    - name: h2
      debug: msg=handler2
      changed_when: true
      notify: h1

Do not run it. Think!

And compare your reasoning with real output. Be baffled.

[1] Ansible-bingo is poorly maintained and usually is referred in a middle of discussions or when new ‘bingo’ discovered (like this one). The link:

GitHub - amarao/ansible-bingo: Examples of WTF from Ansible