A user definition that declares no password falls back to
{{ 42 | strong_password }}. That is a template, not a value: it is re-rendered
at every use site, so the task that creates an account and the task that later
authenticates as it read two different secrets. The account exists and the
login fails. Inventory creation now decides the value once, after the roles are
resolved and next to the role credentials that were already generated there.
The scope follows the deployment: only roles resolved into this inventory
contribute users, an existing password is never overwritten, and a second run
writes nothing.
Building it duplicated what the package already carried three to seven times
over: an ensure-map helper defined three times, the same fifteen-line
round-trip load repeated seven times, and the vault encrypt-and-reparse dance
twice. They now live in one module, the round-trip counterpart to the existing
read-only yaml_io. host_vars drops from 213 to 130 lines, and its two override
entry points share the merge they used to copy. Behaviour is unchanged, and
that is measured rather than asserted: the committed versions and the new ones
were driven against the same host_vars and produced byte-identical output for
all six writers, comment placement and vault block layout included.
The adapter probes move into their own folder because a shared file-name prefix
reads as a folder in disguise, and the lint that enforces it scans the tracked
file list, so the repository was failing on it. A test that was defined at
module level instead of inside its class, and therefore never ran, is indented
back in.
