F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 21:13 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 08:58:40PM -0400, Ding Yi Chen wrote:
> > You still have not addressed the third party programs and scripts 
> > that monitor /var/log/messages
> 
> A) If someone is installing a program that expects this file, they can also
> install rsyslog.
> 
> B) Fedora, RHEL, and most Red Hat derived distributions use
> /var/log/messages, but not all do -- for example, Rocks (common in HPC)
> breaks out syslog messages into individual files per facility. Debian and
> Ubuntu? Totally diferent. (/var/log/syslog)
> 
> So, these third-party scripts need to be flexible anyway. I don't think this
> is a very strong point in the conversation.

FWIW, FHS states[1]:

"The following files, or symbolic links to files, must be in /var/log,
if the corresponding subsystem is installed:

File	Description
lastlog	record of last login of each user
messages	system messages from syslogd"

There is clearly some ambiguity there; I'm not sure FHS writers
considered the possibility of something that is clearly meant to fulfill
the role of a system logging daemon but which does not want to
write /var/log/messages .

[1]
http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_2.3/fhs-2.3.html#VARLOGLOGFILESANDDIRECTORIES
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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