Epylog (Re: please deactivate services by default!)

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 4:03 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> Heh. Yeah, okay, fair point -- but currently it's the best we've got (given
>> that epylog seems stalled)...
>>
>
> I haven't heard from Konstantin about epylog in a good long while now.
>
> You should email him and see if he needs someone to take it over.

He does. :)

The trouble is that once I was no longer a sysadmin, that particular
itch has disappeared. I have been a busy boy in the past few years,
too (wife, family, etc), so I no longer have copious amounts of time
to dedicate to hacking on fun projects in the evenings. Mea culpa.

Epylog is still a sound project, it just needs to become someone
else's itch to scratch. :) The plans that I had for it were:

 1. Rewrite log parsing routines to be configurable and not hardcoded,
since programmers don't really think twice about modifying those (one
day is "service foo started by user=bar domain=baz," in the next
version it's "service foo started: user=bar; domain=baz")
 2. There is really just a couple of log notice types that make up the
bulk of messages -- e.g. "user foo logged into bar using service baz
from host quux", just in different formats. These can all be
abstracted and put into sqlite db for generating reports (not in huge
dicts as right now).
 3. Everything else are one-offs that people either don't care about
("daemon foo received a message!") or really-really care about
("smartd says the disk on node X is about to keel over and die"). The
crap you filter out, and whatever doesn't fall under "crap" you
usually put at the top.

That's pretty much all it would take to make Epylog not as annoying
when it comes to configuration and hacking. However, like I said -- I
don't think I'll have the time or motivation to do that. Moving the
project to fedorahosted was one of the steps I had in mind towards
making it more accessible for others to hack on (should they be
interested in that).

Cheers,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev
Montréal, Québec