fix(bundles): add configure/terminfo bundle — install alacritty terminfo on remote hosts - #135

Review — changes requested

Adds a bundle that installs the alacritty terminfo and lets sshd accept TERM. The problem is real (#227) and the play is short, but as written it targets the whole inventory rather than the lab hosts, and its one substantive task is wrapped in ignore_errors, so the common failure mode is a green run that changed nothing. Also worth noting it is stale — opened 2026-07-15, no commits since, and dev has moved.

Blocking

• bundles/core/linux/ubuntu/configure/terminfo/main.yml:17 — hosts: all, but the header comment says "scenarios import this via import_playbook … overriding hosts to the relevant inventory group". import_playbook cannot override a literal hosts: — vars: on the import only feeds variables into the play, so the override only works when hosts is a template. Every other bundle in this repo does exactly that (hosts: "{{ global_vm_ssh_name }}" ×26, "{{ TARGET_GROUP }}", "{{ target_group }}"), or names a group literally.

  This is not cosmetic: scenario inventories carry proxmox: and proxmox_cli: groups (e.g. scenarios/blank_scenario_6_subnets/templates/ansible-inventory.j2), so all includes the hypervisor and the deployer. With become: true the play would rewrite /etc/ssh/sshd_config and reload sshd on the Proxmox node — well outside what a terminfo bundle should touch.

  - name: configure sshd and alacritty terminfo
    hosts: "{{ TARGET_GROUP }}"
  

• Bundle path does not follow the repo layout. Bundles are flat dotted directories under an existing category — bundles/admin/software.install.deployer_api_backend, bundles/generic/network.baseline.ssh, bundles/proxmox/cloud_init_image.download.ubuntu_lts_minimal. This one introduces a new top-level category core/ plus a nested linux/ubuntu/configure/terminfo/ path. Categories on dev are admin, ctf, generic, proxmox, _tools — nothing resolves core/. Something like bundles/generic/terminfo.install.alacritty/ fits the existing scheme.

Non-blocking

• main.yml:22-27 — the lineinfile on /etc/ssh/sshd_config has no validate:. The repo is editing sshd on remote hosts it reaches only over ssh, so the usual guard applies: validate: '/usr/sbin/sshd -t -f %s' refuses to write a config that would not parse. A reload will not apply a broken file, but it survives to the next restart and locks the host out then.
• main.yml:38-44 — ignore_errors: true on the copy makes the bundle's only real action fail silently. src: /usr/share/terminfo/a/alacritty is read from the controller, and the deployer-cli is a headless VM that will not normally have Alacritty installed. Result: play reports ok, terminfo is absent, operator still gets 'alacritty': unknown terminal type. Either gate it on a controller-side stat with an explicit skip message, or install ncurses-term on the target and drop the controller dependency entirely.
• main.yml:24 — insertafter: '^AcceptEnv LANG LC_\*' falls back to end-of-file when the pattern does not match. If the target's sshd_config ends in a Match block, AcceptEnv TERM lands inside that block and applies only to that match context. Anchoring with insertbefore: '^Match ' as a fallback, or dropping a file into /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/, avoids the ordering question — Ubuntu 24.04 already ships the Include for it.
• The bundle is not imported by any scenario (grep -rn "configure/terminfo" matches only the file itself), so nothing exercises it yet. That is presumably intentional pending #227, but it does mean none of the above has been run for real.

Cross-repo

• No companion PR needed. This adds a bundle rather than renaming one, and no scenario references it, so nothing in range42-backend-api or range42-catalog resolves the name today. That changes the moment a scenario imports it — at which point the path above becomes the thing that has to be right first.

Verification

• ansible-lint / ansible-playbook --syntax-check — not run, neither is installed in this environment and the routine does not install system-wide. Findings above are from reading the play against the repo's other bundles, not from a linter.
• Secrets pass on the diff — clean.
• Bundle-layout and hosts: conventions checked against all bundles on dev.

Generated by Claude Code

Thanks for the review @pparage — the findings are correct against this diff, but the diff itself is stale: this PR's head (d850879) was carried verbatim into the fix-terminfo-bundle-to-generic branch (as 326cead) and merged to dev yesterday via #141, which already resolves both blocking items:

• hosts: all / import override — the merged bundle uses hosts: "{{ terminfo_hosts | default('all') }}", and admin_services_lab stage_01 imports it with terminfo_hosts: r42_admin_services_lab_group.
• Bundle path — it now lives at bundles/generic/systems.configure.terminfo/ per the chore: renaming bundles/ to the <tier>/<subject>.<verb>.<object> naming grammar #133 naming grammar, with README.md + bundle_parameters.

Your non-blocking points about ignore_errors: true, the missing sshd validate:, and the insertafter fallback do survive in the merged version — follow-up PR incoming that addresses them (plus dropping the default('all'), since scenario inventories carry proxmox/proxmox_cli groups and a forgotten terminfo_hosts would still touch sshd on the hypervisor).

Closing as superseded by #141.