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is_redhat() misses Rocky/Alma/CentOS Stream/Oracle Linux lsb_release IDs -> pkg dies "OS/Provider not supported"

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
75/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
perl
Domain
cli, devops, infrastructure

Research direction

Look at Rex::Commands::Gather::is_redhat to see the @redhat_clones list and the regex matching. The issue mentions specific files: Rex::Hardware::Host::get_operating_system and Rex::Pkg->get. Start by adding the missing OS names to the list and fixing the comparison to be exact. Test by installing lsb_release on a Rocky/Alma system and running the provided rex command to verify pkg works.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Rex version: 1.16.1 (is_redhat unchanged on master)

Problem

On current RHEL rebuilds the OS detection depends on whether lsb_release is installed:

  • Without lsb_release, Rex::Hardware::Host::get_operating_system falls through to /etc/redhat-release and returns Redhat, so everything works.
  • With lsb_release, it returns lsb_release -s -i verbatim (only SUSE and ManjaroLinux are normalised). The IDs current rebuilds report there are not in @redhat_clones in Rex::Commands::Gather::is_redhat:
lsb_release -s -i source is_redhat
Rocky redhat-lsb-core 4.1 (Rocky 8/9) 0
RockyLinux EPEL lsb_release 3.2 0
AlmaLinux both 0
CentOSStream redhat-lsb-core 4.1 0
OracleLinux EPEL lsb_release 3.2 0

Because of that, Rex::Pkg->get does not map the host to Redhat. It tries Rex::Pkg::Rocky (and so on), and dies:

OS not supported (Rocky)
OS/Provider not supported

So any pkg / update_package_db call breaks on a Rocky/Alma host as soon as someone installs redhat-lsb-core or EPEL's lsb_release.

Second issue: the OS name is used as an unanchored, unescaped regex

if ( grep { /$os/i } @redhat_clones ) {

$os is the pattern and the list entries are the subjects. So a detected name matches whenever it is a substring of any entry: RedHatEnterprise only works because it is a substring of RedHatEnterpriseServer, and Red, Server or Enterprise would also return 1. Regex metacharacters in $os are interpreted rather than matched literally.

Suggested fix

  1. Add Rocky, RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, CentOSStream and OracleLinux (and RedHatEnterprise, which redhat-lsb-core 4.1 reports on RHEL 9) to @redhat_clones.
  2. Compare exactly: grep { lc($_) eq lc($os) } @redhat_clones.
  3. Optionally, make the detection independent of lsb_release by falling back to /etc/os-release ID / ID_LIKE (ID_LIKE contains rhel on all of the above). This would cover future rebuilds without a list change.

Items 1 and 2 are a small, safe change. Item 3 is the durable one.

Reproduce

# Rocky Linux 9
dnf install -y redhat-lsb-core   # or EPEL's lsb_release
rex -H rocky9 -e 'say get_operating_system(); say is_redhat() ? 1 : 0; pkg "curl", ensure => "present"'
# Rocky / 0 / OS/Provider not supported

(Found in Rex::GPU, which now works around it by not calling pkg on these hosts.)

Dominant language
Perl
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Forks
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