[Mageia-dev] Logging + Provides/Requires (Re: [RFC] rsyslog vs journalctl)

Colin Guthrie mageia at colin.guthr.ie
Fri Feb 8 16:56:45 CET 2013


'Twas brillig, and Anne Nicolas at 08/02/13 13:07 did gyre and gimble:
> Le 08/02/2013 13:14, Olav Vitters a écrit :
>> On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 10:31:42AM +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>>>   Q) Will we make persistent disk-based journals optional?
>>>     Yes: Makes it harder to ask a consistent question to extract debug.
>>>     No: Some people will moan.
>>
>> It is either persistent logging or logging in memory right? I assume
>> people won't understand that it'll log anyways, just in memory. So no
>> point in giving an option that does not do what people might expect.
>>
> 
> Just one point about this. It was said during meeting that having
> journalctl by default could break some other software like fail2ban.
> This should be checked.

Yes this is pretty much the issue I'm trying to address really.

e.g. basesystem package already requires systemd, so there is little
point in it requiring syslog-daemon too as this is always satisified by
systemd at present.

My proposal was originally to add a new dep "system-logger" and allow
systemd to satify that. In the process I would remove the dep from
various packages that currently have it (cronie, postfix) as systemd is
now a required component anyway and journald will capture their logs
happily. The final part would be identifying packages, like fail2ban,
which parse these logs and therefore do genuinely need something to
satisfy syslog-daemon requires.

In the future, fail2ban will have direct journal integration (posted the
link earlier) and thus we can drop the dep when the time comes.

So, I think what I'll do for now, is basically:

1. Forget about system-logger provide/require. It's not needed.
2. Make systemd not provide syslog-daemon.
3. Drop syslog-daemon require from basesystem* pkgs.
4. Drop syslog-daemon require from cronie and postfix (and others where
it's not strictly needed any more).
5. Ensure fail2ban does have a require.
6. Start writing some docs here and there about it.

Feel free to chime in on points 4 & 5 (I'm too stupid to know the right
urpm* commands to work out what pkgs currently require syslog-daemon to
evaluate if they really do need it. Also if people can think of any
other log parsers like fail2ban, please let me know so we can make sure
they have the right requires.

Cheers

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
Open Source:
  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/


More information about the Mageia-dev mailing list