meta/argument_specs.yml in a role is treated as a playbook

[briantist]

Summary

I'm hitting this issue by way of a vscode extension so I'm having a bit of a hard time determining if it's definitely an issue in ansible-lint or not (see tomaciazek/vscode-ansible#19).

I'm also hitting #1507 so it's difficult for me to run ansible-lint directly with a modern version of Ansible.

But the issue I'm seeing is that the meta/argument_specs.yml is "failing" with an unexpected internal error while other files in the role are being treated ok. This text is shown the extension's log:

[Info - 9:04:01 PM] [ansible-lint] WARNING Overriding detected file kind 'yaml' with 'playbook' for given positional argument: /home/briantist/code/flatiron-ansible-collections/ansible_collections/flatiron/vault/roles/agent/meta/argument_specs.yml
You can skip specific rules or tags by adding them to your configuration file:
# .ansible-lint
warn_list: # or 'skip_list' to silence them completely
- internal-error # Unexpected internal error

Finished with 1 failure(s), 0 warning(s) on 1 files.

I was able to workaround it by adding the following in .ansible-lint:

kinds:
  - meta: '**/roles/**/meta/argument_specs.yml'

I'm unsure if marking it as meta is "correct" but it does make the failure go away.

Issue Type

• Bug Report

Ansible and Ansible Lint details

$ ansible --version
ansible [core 2.11.2] 
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/home/briantist/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/briantist/.a211/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible
  ansible collection location = /home/briantist/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
  executable location = /home/briantist/.a211/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.6.9 (default, Jan 26 2021, 15:33:00) [GCC 8.4.0]
  jinja version = 3.0.1
  libyaml = True

$ ansible-lint --version
ansible-lint 5.0.12 using ansible 2.11.2
FATAL: Ansible CLI (2.11.2) and python module (2.9.22) versions do not match. This indicates a broken execution environment.

• ansible installation method: pip
• ansible-lint installation method: pip

OS / ENVIRONMENT

Ubuntu 18.04 (WSL2)

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

Desired Behaviour

File is linted correctly.

Actual Behaviour

(in description)

[ssbarnea]

marking it as meta is wrong, it is a new format the linter does not support yet, just force mapping to "args_spec" there. The string has not yet special meaning but will help us write rules specific for these files. yaml checking will still be performed anyway.

[briantist]

ok makes sense, should I change this to a feature request? Or open a new feature request?

[ssbarnea]

Just make a PR to fix that bug and we are good. I think it would be a very good idea to include a sample such file inside examples/ directory (inside one role). I am almost sure that if you add it, at least one test will fail. When you make the fix, the test should start to work again. Than ensures that we do not have a regression in the future.