[syslog-ng]Multiple configuration files.

Scott A. McIntyre scott@xs4all.nl
Fri, 5 Jan 2001 10:40:42 +0100


Also sprach Gregor Binder (gbinder@sysfive.com):

> > configuration file to be read" manner?  The examples I'm thinking of
> > include xinetd and logrotate...
> 
> I didn't realize this was increasingly popular ;)

Ah, well, not necessarily with users so much as Certain Operating
Systems and Developers Of Packages For Them.  ;-)

> I would prefer "include" directives as opposed to the directory thing.

That would certainly work just as well, if not better.  The accomplished
goal is essentially the same.  My frustration at using syslog-ng for
this in the past is that I had a very large and complicated series of
filters and destinations and I found that it was difficult to automate
the addition of new datasources as the order-dependence of things could
cause problems.

> What I usually do when I work with software that doesn't support
> including and yet has a huge configuration, is to write a little Make-
> file with a default target that does whatever needs to be done to

Yes, that is what I've been doing in certain circumstances as well.  The
downside is that you begin to have a lot of multi-tool dependence and if
one of those tools breaks, or gets tweaked/modified, well, a much more
important (and potentially complicated) system fails behind it.  I
generally try to avoid the band-aid upon band-aid upon perl-script upon
band-aid solution for this reason.  

Having said that, my *real* preference here is that the config file be
in XML.  :-)  That would sort out a lot of problems from my point of
view.  I may end up just doing this anyway and using some XSLT to create
the syslog-ng.conf.

Thanks for the ideas!

Scott