Inventory plugin does not handle meta 'refresh_inventory' as it should

[Thulium-Drake]

SUMMARY

This is a problem that was reported over at community.general because the Proxmox inventory doesn't handle meta: refresh_inventory correctly.

And as that module was (lovingly <3 ansible-collections/community.general#545) copied by me a long time ago to make it suitable for use by Proxmox, and looking at the code, this issue might also plague the foreman inventory.

A more detailed description of a playbook that reproduces this (for Proxmox) can be found here: ansible-collections/community.general#9710

And a proposal to fix the handling of caching can be found here: ansible-collections/community.general#9760

On that proposal there are some comments from a fellow maintainer that point to the current proposal to be not optimal in the long run.

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report