sos package name update into Debian/Ubuntu

[arif-ali]

Hi folks,

A quick announcement ...

I have been thinking about this for months and after speaking one of our Ubuntu guys, we have started the process of changing the name of the package from sosreport to sos as per upstream and being in-line with RPM based distros. This will only fall into the latest Debian and Ubuntu, and will not trickle down.

So for now the following will apply once the package has been accepted in Debian

Ubuntu:

• bionic (18.04), focal (20.04), jammy (22.04), noble (24.04) and oracular (24.10) -- sosreport
• plucky (25.04) -- sos

Debian:

• bullseye (11), bookworm (12) -- sosreport
• sid, trixie (13) -- sos

regards,
Arif

[pmoravec]

Thanks for the info, the change makes sense to me (as a person outside Ubuntu world). I guess it implies no change in upstream (including CI tests)..?

[arif-ali]

Good, question, and let me clarify

The package first has to be accepted, with additionally a transitional package. This means that once the process is done in Debian, we can install install sos via the sosreport packaging, but that is just a meta package that installs sos. The same will then happen in Ubuntu development release for the new version of sos.

My only thing is that we've been carrying the sosreport name for a while now, and hence tha change could be quite drastic for the Ubuntu community, so the transitional may stay for a bit which may include the sosreport and sos-collector binaries and man-pages independent of the sos package. This, therefore will mean, if anyone removes the sosreport package, the deprecated commands will also go away. I am still working on the best way, and which releases we continue with the transitional package, and may need further discussions with out Ubuntu Team on this.

So, at the moment, even in CI, we shouldn't really see a change.

I have a branch already in my local repo ready for a PR, but don't want to break anything in CI yet.

Once the initial bit is done, and plucky is released in April, I will be changing CI to build the new package moving forward as well as sync'ing all the relevant debian folder work we have done over the past 6 to 8 months, so that we can better align upstream.

Furthermore, my future plan is also do more testing for Debian as well, as this can help overall Ubuntu Development as well.

In-time, I will update the wiki to describe the Debian process and building packages, and uploading to Debian and potentially Ubuntu as well. The wiki is well out of date, but I wanted the package to be in a good place before I start making wholesale changes to the documentation.

This will hopefully ensure that the active downstream projects are all consistent and documented.

I hope that makes more sense.