Change lists into dicts in the 'vars:' sections of playbooks

[acozine]

What maintenance needs to be done?

Some of our playbooks currently have vars sections that are formatted as lists. Like this:

vars:
  - firstvar: firstvalue
  - secondvar: secondvalue

Our current version of Ansible is warning us that, starting in Ansible 2.18, this will not be allowed:

[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Specifying a list of dictionaries for vars is deprecated in favor of specifying a dictionary. This feature will be removed in version 2.18. 
Deprecation warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.

So we need to change those playbooks.

Level of urgency

• High
• Moderate
• Low

Relevant deadlines

If this maintenance relates to an End of Life date or other deadline, please enter it here.

• As of today, we are using Ansible Core 2.16, which will be EOL in May, 2025
• Ansible Core 2.17 is the current latest; it will be EOL in November, 2025
• Ansible Core 2.18 should be released in November of 2024
  See the Ansible Core support matrix for details.

Why is this maintenance needed?

To avoid playbook-breaking errors when we upgrade to Ansible Core 2.18.

Acceptance criteria

• I can run all playbooks with Ansible Core 2.16 and not see the deprecation warning shown above

Implementation notes, if any

In most playbooks, all that's needed is to remove the - in front of each entry under vars:.