F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Bill Nottingham]

Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) said: 
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 11:41:24AM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > > A) If someone is installing a program that expects this file, they can
> > > also install rsyslog.
> > But, at the packaging level, I think it's been demonstrated that 'a program
> > that expects this file' is not something we do a good job of consistently
> > expressing. That should be fixed regardless of this feature proposal, but I
> > think should definitely be a required component of accepting it.
> 
> I'm reading this to mean by adding package dependencies where missing,
> right?
> 
> This is actually Kinda Hard, because /var/log/messages is really more an
> artifact of our default rsyslog config than part of any package. If we
> wanted to say that some syslog service always provides that file, we should
> make it clear that changing it is actually not available for end-user
> configuration and should never been changed. We've never done that.
> 
> So, adding "Requires: rsyslog" isn't _really_ sufficient. We could ship the
> /var/log/messages configuration in a subpackage that goes into
> /etc/rsyslog.d/ and ask packages which expect /var/log/messages to require
> that.

I think it's more correct for packages that expect to work on a textual
/var/log/messages (or similar) to have a requirement on a meta 'syslog'
package (which all three major daemons provide), even if it's implicitly
depending on the default configuration of those packages, rather than the
alternative of *no* dependencies that we have now.

Bill