F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 17.07.13 12:24, Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:10:35PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Sounds good, but:
> 
> $ repoquery --whatprovides syslog
> syslog-ng-0:3.4.1-1.fc19.x86_64
> sysklogd-0:1.5-13.fc19.x86_64
> rsyslog-0:7.2.6-1.fc19.x86_64
> systemd-0:204-9.fc19.x86_64
> 
> $ rpm -q --changelog systemd|grep -B1 'Provide syslog'
> * Tue Oct 23 2012 Lennart Poettering <lpoetter at redhat.com> - 195-2
> - Provide syslog because the journal is fine as a syslog implementation
> 
> Lennart, maybe this should be re-thought as to what "syslog" means exactly
> in this context? It's true that from an application-logging-stuff point of
> view systemd-jourald provides this, but maybe that's not right.

There were some packages which required "syslog" because they were
clients to it, which is a pretty bogus thing to do.

There's one of those packages left over now. Which is
per-Unix-Syslog. If we get that one fixed to not require syslog, then we
could drop Provides: syslog from journald.

However, I wonder if this would be a good idea. journald does provide
the /dev/log socket. I think most people understood the "syslog"
dependency so far as a dependency from log client to log server, and not
as a dependency on the existance of /var/log/messages.

So, maybe, instead of dropping the "Provides syslog" thing from
journald, maybe we should add an explicit "syslog-files" dependency (or
something named like that) and then make the classic syslog
implementations provide that and the packages which actually need
/var/log/messages pull that it?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.