sosreport is broken

[bugproxy]

sosreport seems to be broken in the area of capturing /var/log files. I am seeing symlinks create for essential log files like "kernel.log" and "syslog" for which the target files are not getting included. For example:

$ ls -l sosreport/var/log/
total 124
-rw-r-----+ 1 guest guest 114 Feb 2 18:07 apport.log
-rw-r-----+ 1 guest guest 878 Jan 1 22:08 apport.log.1
drwxr-x---+ 2 guest guest 4096 Jan 1 06:25 apt
drwxr-x---+ 2 guest guest 4096 Jan 31 06:25 cups
-rw-r-----+ 1 guest guest 2846 Feb 2 11:29 dpkg.log
drwxr-x---+ 3 guest guest 4096 Dec 20 11:34 installer
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 guest guest 46 Feb 6 08:39 kern.log -> ../../sos_strings/logs/var.log.kern.log.tailed
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 guest guest 48 Feb 6 08:39 kern.log.1 -> ../../sos_strings/logs/var.log.kern.log.1.tailed
drwxr-x---+ 3 guest guest 4096 Dec 20 15:51 libvirt
drwxr-x---+ 2 guest guest 4096 Feb 5 13:21 lxd
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 guest guest 44 Feb 6 08:39 syslog -> ../../sos_strings/logs/var.log.syslog.tailed
-rw-r-----+ 1 guest guest 48223 Jan 31 06:25 syslog.1
drwxr-x---+ 2 guest guest 4096 Dec 20 11:45 unattended-upgrades
$ ls sosreport/
date free java lsof ps sos_logs usr
dev hostname last lspci pstree sos_reports var
df initctl lib mount route sys version.txt
dmidecode installed-debs lsb-release netstat run uname vgdisplay
etc ip_addr lsmod proc sos_commands uptime
$

It appears to be some attempt to shorten logs, although that itself is disconcerting. Unclear what options were used to run sosreport.

====
My hunch is that the "--log-size" option is being used, either automatically or manually, but that option is failing to include the "sos_strings" subdirectory in the archive.

== ==
I have confirmed that this issue still exists. On Ubuntu 18.04 I and another distro, I ran the following command:

sosreport --log-size=1

I then copied the sosreport off to another system and unpacked it. In the case of the other distro sosreport, the var/log/messages files was a symlink but was readable (existed). However, in the case of Ubuntu the var/log/syslog file was a broken symlink "syslog -> ../../sos_strings/logs/var.log.syslog.tailed", and no "sos_strings" directory existed, and thus the data was lost.

sosreport 3.5-1ubuntu3 (Ubuntu 18.04)

vs.

sos-3.5-6.el7.noarch (other distro)

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

Error output:
# cat sos_logs/logs-plugin-errors.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/sosreport/sos/sosreport.py", line 1300, in collect
    plug.collect()
  File "/usr/share/sosreport/sos/plugins/__init__.py", line 877, in collect
    self._collect_strings()
  File "/usr/share/sosreport/sos/plugins/__init__.py", line 860, in _collect_strings
    (content.splitlines()[0]).decode('utf8', 'ignore'))
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

This is being fixed as part of 1761442.