I do a lot of ansible which needs to run on multiple versions, and their yaml typing are not consistent - whenever I have a variable in a logic statement, I nearly always need to apply the "| bool" filter.
This is likely hair splitting, but you are far more likely getting bitten by the monster amount of variance in jinja2 versions/behaviors than by anything "yaml-y"
For example, yaml does not care about this whatsoever
- name: skip on Tuesdays
when: ansible_date_time.weekday != "Tuesday"
but different ansible versions are pretty yolo about whether one needs to additionally wrap those fields in jinja2 mustaches
and another common bug is when the user tries to pass in a boolean via "-e" because those are coerced into string key-value pairs as in
$ ansible -e not_today=true -m debug -a var=not_today all
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"not_today": "true"
}
but if one uses the jinja/python compatible flavor, it does the thing
$ ansible -e not_today=True -m debug -a var=not_today all
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"not_today": true
}
It may be more work than you care for, since sprinkling rampant |bool likely doesn't actively hurt anything, but the |type_debug filter[1] can help if it's behaving mysteriously
