Argument spec checking

[pimvh]

Hi all! I have an idea for a new feature. I would like to know whether it would fit in the current idea of ansible-lint.

I am writing roles with an argument spec defined in meta/main.yaml (I think it can also be defined in meta/argument_spec.yaml for backwards compatibility), and when I run the role the argument spec gets validated, which is normal Ansible behaviour.

There are cases where I have written an argument spec including default values, but there is currently no way to ensure they match with the values which are actually defined in defaults/main.yaml, which is also pointed out in documentation. I am not sure whether Ansible intends to develop other features for this, but I think this could be a useful feature for ansible-lint.

I would envision something like the following:

argument_spec:

...
argument_specs:
  main:
    short_description: ....
    description: |
      ...
    options:
       foo:
         type: str
         default: "i have a sane default"
         description: some value which is passed to a role

defaults/main.yaml:

foo: "this is something else"

In this case the default from the argument spec, and the default values do not match. ansible-lint could parse the argument spec and check whether the default values are correctly defined in defaults/main.yaml.

Ansible lint would then tell something like: warning the default value in defaults/main.yaml does not match the value in argument_spec

Would this be an addition to ansible-lint?