[syslog-ng] syslog-ng 1.1.7 released

[Balazs Scheidler]

> I started to write a reply agreeing completely with you, but this is a
> sticky issue.  The design philosophy of unix programs is supposed to be to
> make a program do a specific thing well, and to call other programs (that
> do their specific thing well) to do other things -- and this has definite
> advantages over the Windows idea of making huge programs with dozens of
> overlapping features -- but log rotation is definitely a logical extension
> of handling system logs.  From a configuration standpoint, it is much
> cleaner to take care of everything regarding one log in one step. The
> problem, however, is that there are a number of different ways that a site
> might want to rotate its logs.  Probably the most common way is what was
> contained in the proposed syntax above: filename.1, filename.2, etc.  At
> JMU, however, we rotate our logs in the (what I think is much more
> logical) filename.YYYY-MM-DD, in a couple instances with time of day
> tacked on, and in most cases we gzip the logs as well.  If log rotation
> were part of the syslog daemon, it would need to be flexible enough to
> keep most people happy.  It would probably need to have at least the above
> two ways of naming rotated logs (digits and times), it would need the
> ability to compress logs immediately after rotation (gzip or bzip2), and
> it would need the ability to call an external script to do whatever else a
> site might like to do with a rotated log.  (And if you could have a file
> rotate into a date-style filename anyway, why not have the ability to save
> it there in the first place?)  Now, is it worth the time to write in these
> features, and do it well?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But if it were done in a
> flexible way, it would make configuration nice and easy, and keep it all
> in one place.

I had the same problems when thinking about logrotation. What I don't like
in current schemes is that from distribution to distribution (and from one
UNIX to the other) configuring log rotation is different. RedHat has its
logrotate (which I do like very much), Debian has IMHO a slightly worse
solution. Providing these features in syslog-ng would make this
situation a bit easier. And strictly IMHO logrotation info should be kept
where log files are specified. (Debian does this, but it's too inflexible,
because I can't specify how many generations a given file should have, and
how often a given file should be rotated)

Maybe it would be enough to bundle a logrotation program with syslog-ng (for
example logrotate). Or simply file a wishlist bug for debian to move to
logrotate.

-- 
Bazsi
PGP key: http://www.balabit.hu/pgpkey.txt, or finger bazsi@balabit.hu