Over the past few months, I've noticed some of my automation failing on Red Hat-derivative OSes like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. The reason for this has to do with the inclusion of a curl-minimal package in some distros, which conflicts with curl if you try installing the full package.
Unfortunately, the fix for this is a little strange, and so only ends up in Ansible's dnf module, not in the more cross-compatible package module.
The error I was seeing is like:
Depsolve Error occurred:
Problem: problem with installed package curl-minimal-7.76.1-29.el9_4.x86_64
- package curl-minimal-7.76.1-29.el9_4.x86_64 from @System conflicts with curl provided by curl-7.76.1-29.el9_4.x86_64 from baseos
- package curl-minimal-7.76.1-29.el9_4.x86_64 from baseos conflicts with curl provided by curl-7.76.1-29.el9_4.x86_64 from baseos
- conflicting requests
To fix this problem, I switched my tasks from using package to using dnf, and set the allowerasing parameter to true.
Before:
- name: Ensure dependencies are installed.
package:
name: curl
state: present
After:
- name: Ensure dependencies are installed.
dnf:
name: curl
allowerasing: true
state: present
If your task is meant to run cross-platform, DNF certainly won't run out of the box on Debian-based installs (or other flavors of Linux), so you will also need to split the one task into two—add a when condition to only run the dnf task on RHEL-derivatives, and the package task on all others.
This seems to fix the issue, see Ansible core issue DNF fails to properly resolve and install package based the file it provides and this comment about --allowerasing for more details.