Re: Should logrotate timer be enabled by default on all installations?
On Wednesday, March 18, 2020 3:50:34 PM CET Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 01:04:58PM +0100, Kamil Dudka wrote:
> logrotate is a utility designed to simplify the administration of log
> files on
a system which generates a lot of log files. It used to be
> triggered by cron. The cron hook was unconditionally installed
with
> logrotate but it took effect only if a cron daemon was installed.
>
> Starting with Fedora 30, logrotate is triggered by a systemd timer
> instead.
In order to make updates smoother, the timer was enabled on
> updates in case a cron daemon was configured on the system.
>
> The timer is currently not enabled on fresh installs to avoid surprises
> (such
as data lost) on systems where logrotate is installed but not
> actually used. logrotate can also be triggered independently of
> systemd/cron and can be even run by non-privileged users to rotate logs
> they have access to.
>
> Some people think that the logrotate timer should be enabled by default on
> all
systems where the logrotate package is installed:
>
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1655153#c4
>
>
> Do you think it would be a good idea?
Yes, I think it's reasonable to enable it by default. People should just
not
install logrotate package if it's not necessary. We should also make
sure that the package is not Required from those packages that use
the
journal.
(I think that for most cases text logs are not necessary, and journald
is a better approach, but for the cases where text logs are created,
logrotate is something that people want 99% of the time, so we should
make it easy to have the right thing happen if the package is installed.)
Note: we have a documented process for enabling services:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/DefaultServices/.
logrotate.timer satisfies the requirements to be enabled without a fesco
exception. So it should be enough to file a PR for fedora-release.
Zbyszek
Thank you all for sharing your opinion on this!
I have opened a pull request to enable logrotate.timer by default:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/fedora-release/pull-request/111
Kamil