Why does Karmic not provide a syslog.conf manpage?

[Derek Broughton]

Detlef Lechner wrote:

> Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>> Detlef Lechner wrote:
>>   
>>> Hello,
>>> Why does Karmic not provide a syslog.conf manpage although it writes
>>> syslogs?
>>> '~$ man syslog.conf; No manual entry for syslog.conf'.
>>> The Internet does provide one, though:
>>> http://linux.die.net/man/5/syslog.conf.
>>>     
>>
>> It's actually available from two packages.  Here's how I figured that
>> out:
...
>> apt-file search /usr/share/man/man5/syslog.conf.5.gz
>>
>> inetutils-syslogd: /usr/share/man/man5/syslog.conf.5.gz
>> sysklogd: /usr/share/man/man5/syslog.conf.5.gz
>>
>> You probably only want one of these.

> Karmic does not install by default the DEB program package
> 'inetutils-syslogd'. Still Karmic provides a file /var/log/syslog. Thus
> I find the Synaptic statement: "system logging daemon: The syslog daemon
> is responsible for providing logging of messages received from programs
> and facilities on the local host as well as from remote hosts." wrong or
> at least misleading. 

Why?  Actually, by default, Ubuntu provides logging via rsyslog (it's in 
main - sysklogd and inetutils-syslogd are in universe), and rsyslog provides 
syslog.conf and a man page for it.  inetutils-syslogd is only one of quite a 
few ways to get a syslog daemon, but I'm sure from its authors point of 
view, it was "the" daemon when he first wrote it).

> According to Synaptic's text I should not have a
> file /var/log/syslog as I did not install the DEB program package
> 'inetutils-syslogd'.  --  Can you comment.

All that says is that /var/log/syslog is explicitly provided by inetutils-
syslogd.  Nothing says another package can't create it in its post-install 
script.
-- 
derek