Changing ansible loop due to v2.11 deprecation

I had this same question and it looks like each set of packages with the same states will have to be their own block. Looking at Ansible's documentation, they have a block for each state as an example so I took that example, cut up my packages based off their states and followed ignacio's example and it ended up working perfectly.

So basically it would look like this

- name: Install packages required for log-deployment
  apt:
    name:
      - gcc
      - python-devel
    state: latest
    autoclean: yes

- name: Install packages required for log-deployment
  apt:
    name:
      - python
      - mariadb
      - mysql-devel
    state: installed

Hope that makes sense and helps!

You can code the array in YAML style to make it more readable:

- name: Install utility packages common to all hosts
  apt:
    name:
      - aptitude
      - jq
      - curl
      - git-core
      - at
    state: present
    autoclean: yes

I came across this exact same problem , but with a much longer list of apps , held in a vars file. This is the code I implemented to get around that problem. The list of the apps is placed into the "apps" variable and Ansible iterates over that.

- name: Install default applications
  apt:
    name: "{{item}}"
    state: latest
  loop: "{{ apps }}"
  when: ansible_distribution == 'Ubuntu' or ansible_distribution == 'Debian'
  tags:
     - instapps

The file holding the list of apps to install is in the Defaults directory in the role directory for this task - namely the "common" role directory.

roles
    - common
      - Defaults
        - main.yml