RFC: Deprecate foreman-debug

Development
1

Hello,

foreman-debug script has been incorporated into sosreport tool, a generic support/troubleshoot data/log collector which works on most Linux distributions including RHEL, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and others. The code has been improved vastly, from simple shell script to Python code with modular architecture. The whole rewrite was driven by Jake Hunsaker from sosreport team and Pavel Moravec of Red Hat who made extensive multiple-weeks testing to make sure there is no information loss, including plugins (katello, tasks). For more details see:

https://github.com/sosreport/sos/pull/1525

Don’t worry, nothing is changing for now and you can keep using foreman-debug. It will take some time until sosreport lands in official repositories for major linux distributions. We also need to keep foreman-debug for some transition period - although it’s being rebased in RHEL-based distros, Debian is stuck with the same sosreport version forever.

I would like to encourage you to test sosreport on your Foreman/Katello/Satellite instance immediately to see how comfortable are you with its outputs. Generally, we agreed that the experience is superior to foreman-debug. No data is duplicated, it can deal with rotated logs and it has many more options.

This is how you do it:

wget https://github.com/sosreport/sos/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
cd sos-master
./sosreport --batch --build

We are loosing one feature tho, that is foreman-debug -u - automatic upload via rsync to our debugs.theforeman.org site. However amount of uploads is very low - about 5 per month and previously we did not have Discourse with its ability to attach files. Sosreport does support FTP upload via sosreport --upload=ftp://a_site/directory so if we want we can offer the same feature after we sunset foreman-debug.

Next steps

  • Test latest sosreport version from upstream and provide feedback.
  • I will go ahead and create a patch that will check if sosreport is installed and use that instead foreman-debug. A warning will be printed that foreman-debug is being deprecated and in case sosreport is missing.
  • Plugin authors with foreman-debug hooks (katello, tasks…) please make sure that all changes to the debug scripts are also made in the sosreport repostitory until we remove foreman-debug completely (this will take some time).

Thanks to all who were involved.

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