Check whether ansible-core need to be installed manually or not

[luixxiul]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
#3820 (comment) says:

For example, on Archlinux, most people would install ansible, which is the "Official assortment of Ansible collections". This package depends on ansible-core, which is "the Ansible program itself".

Interestingly, the Ansible page on ArchWiki recommends ansible-core and then says:

Additionally, you can install the ansible package, which provides a range of community curated collections.

.. so it's possible that some people only install ansible-core and skip this "additional step".

On the other hand, it makes more sense to just install ansible and most people will even blindly do pacman -Syu ansible without even checking this ArchWiki page. Doing that will do the right thing (pulling both ansible and its ansible-core dependency).

On Ubuntu (24.04) and Debian (12) the situation is similar - ansible depends on ansible-core. You installing ansible will do the right thing.

On Rocky Linux, there's only ansible-core in the base repositories.

If you install epel-release (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository), then this extra repository provides:

• ansible, which contains various collections (and depends on ansible-core)

• various ansible-collection-* packages (e.g. ansible-collection-community-docker providing the community.docker Ansible collection), etc.

Interestingly, the ansible package seems to provide the community.docker plugin as well (verified by running rpm -ql ansible | grep community/docker)

So, installing ansible will do the right thing (pulling ansible-core as a dependency), but it requires that you have enabled EPEL (by installing epel-release) first.

I have not tested other popular distros here, but the ones I've tested probably cover most people's use-cases.

In all these distros, simply installing ansible will pretty much do the right thing (pulling ansible-core as a dependency).

It's curious to see what the situation is on Mac / Windows when it comes to this.

Describe the solution you'd like
Check whether the situation is same on Windows and macOS as Linux distros; installing ansible installs ansible-core as well or not, and update the documentation (docs/prerequisites.md, docs/ansible.md, docs/faq.md, etc.) accordingly.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context
See: #2241