Hello,

In short, Ansible reports "n/a" for ansible_distribution_release on our new bullseye nodes. This screws up our mirror setup. This has turned into quite an adventure.

Currently, Debian is frozen to create the "bullseye" release. This means that "bullseye" is really an alias for "testing", that will turn into the release after the freeze period.

So currently Debian bullseye reports itself in /etc/debian_version or /etc/os-release as "bullseye/sid". This sort of makes sense if you consider that you don't commit things to "testing" directly, they go into unstable ("sid") and then migrate after a period of stability. So you can't have "base-files" package in bullseye that hasn't gone through unstable/sid. You can read "bullseye/sid" as "we've chosen the name bullseye and packages going through unstable are destined for it".

Now, you might see a problem in that "unstable" and "bullseye" (testing) now both report themselves in these version files as the same thing (because the unstable packages that provide them move into testing).

"lsb_release -c" tries to be a bit smart about this, and looks at the output of "apt-cache policy" to try and see if you are actually pulling the .deb files from a bullseye repo or an unstable one.

Interestingly, this relies on a "Label" being present in the mirror release files. Since we use reprepro to build our own mirrors, we do not have this (and why nobody else who doens't use our mirrors seems to notice this problem). A fix is proposed with

https://review.opendev.org/c/opendev/system-config/+/787661

So "lsb_release -c" doesn't report anything, leaving Ansible in the dark as to what repo it uses.

When "lsb_release -c" doesn't return anything helpful, Ansible tries to do it's own parsing of the release files. I started hacking on these, but the point raised in

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=845651

gave me pause. It is a fair point that you can not really know if you're on bullseye or sid by examining these files. N/A is probably actually the correct answer from Ansible's POV. Anyway, that is

https://github.com/ianw/ansible/commit/847817a82ed86b5f39a4ccc3ffbff0e0cd63e...

Now, even more annoyingly, setting the label in our mirrors may not be sufficient for "lsb_release -c" to work on our images, because we have cleared out the apt repositories. You would need to run "apt-get update" before Ansible tries to run "lsb_release" to populate it's facts. Now the problem is that we're trying to use Ansible's fact about the distro name to setup apt to point to our mirrors -- so we can't apt-get update before we have that written out! Classic chicken and egg.

The only other idea I have is to hack dib/early setup overwrite /etc/debian_version with "11.0" so that we look like the upcoming release has already been done. "lsb_release -c" will then report "bullsye". However, there is some possibility this will confuse other things, as this release technically hasn't been done. I've proposed that with

https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/diskimage-builder/+/787665

I'm open to suggestions!

-i