Ansible role should be part of the dist

[relaxnow]

It would be better for the role to be part of the dist downloaded.
Ansible would then have to download the dist locally, unpack it, install the role, then call the role it just installed, which would move the locally installed artifacts in place on the destination machines.

This would preclude building on the VM, but that's a feature we want to discourage anyway. It could still work by having the user build the dist on his / her local machine and making Ansible flexible enough to allow the dist to be either local or remote.

[hanswesterbeek]

While I agree with not building apps on the VM anymore, I would like to note that a chicken/egg-style problem may occur.

How does the ansible-role downloaded (which /must/ be downloaded and install before running your regular provisioning playbook) know which version of the dist to get? You would have to maintain that somewhere in such a way that the value is the same for both the role-download and the provisioning process.

Something hacky like bash environment variables comes to mind. This way you will lose oversight of which versions are actually used (they are not simply typed into a group_vars file anymore). Ability to version-track is lost.

For this reason, I believe that you will want to maintain the roles centrally, and not distribute them in this way.