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Ok, that's a valid point. Naively I think a user could also expect the {{items}} to be expanded in the package module but someone who has used Ansible would pro

Ok, that's a valid point. Naively I think a user could also expect the {{items}} to be expanded in the package module but someone who has used Ansible would probably be familiar with the "with_items" idiom. Also I was confused by your claim that your second version was sped up dramatically although it is still using "with_items". Is this due to the use of facts instead of tags?

Spivak 6y ago
The problem the OP was facing was when you had a loop like - name: Install packages package: name={{ item }} with_items: "{{ loooong_list_of_packages }}" and most of the packages are already installed then you're spending most of the loop running the package module just for it to come back any say 'ok'. Hence why the author wanted to use tags to limit the run to specific packages. Rather than doing that you can run package_facts once to get a list of all the installed packages and skip all the module invocations you know won't be changed entirely. You can't do this in general because on a totally unknown system something exteranl might mess with packages between your fact gathering and the install but on your known systems this is almost always fine.