[Bug 794727] Re: /var/log/messages is empty after upgrade to natty

[Tom Hudak]

Phillip,

I'm going to have to side with Peter Selinger here. It is absolutely
unacceptable to introduce such a change without notice or warning. Other
distributions do not have the problem you are attempting to justify this
change with - duplicate messages - that is a problem of the default
configuration in Ubuntu and not a problem with the existence of a
logfile that has been THE defacto source of system messages since the
beginning of time for nearly every unix admin on the planet.

To dodge the issue and push the discussion into the forums where you
very well know it will die in silence is laziness and unbecoming of this
distro.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/794727

Title:
  /var/log/messages is empty after upgrade to natty

Status in “rsyslog” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: rsyslog

  After upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04 I found out that the file /var/log/messages contains nothing and is 0 bytes long. /var/log/messages.1 contains the last messages before the upgrade.
  Fearing that something went wrong I checked, if the disk is full and if the syslog daemon running. All looked fine, so googled and found this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10674332 and reading the rsyslog changelog (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rsyslog/4.6.4-2ubuntu4) I found out, it is I intentionally change. I strongly oppose this change. /var/log/messages is a long established logfile and available on most unix systems. I can't really buy the performance argument. If the system is logging something it is awake anyway,because it still has to write to /var/log/syslog. If the system is idle it does not log. So I don't see much overhead in logging to two files. Moreover in contrast to the catch-all /var/log/syslog files, which containes a lot of useless information (failed authentications, etc..) it is much easier to spot a real problem in the extract, which /var/log/messages provides.

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