[Initng] IRC meeting

[Eric MSP Veith]

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Hello,

sorry for just popping in; there's something I want to say about logging. I 
heavily use Dan Berstein's Qmail and Tinydns. As you might know, they do 
not implement any syslog() call or logging functionality at all. Logging is 
done via Bernstein's daemontools, where you can create a "log" service for 
each daemon you start. Messages to stdin/stderr will be collected by this 
seperately monitored logging daemon, which then does whatever you 
configured it to do (e.g., from just handing it over to syslog over logging 
it to a separate file with the tai64 time format to transmitting it over 
TCP.)

I, personally, like the idea. Nobody has to care about logging at all when 
he writes a daemon. You are never urged to implement again and again a good 
way to communicate to syslog or write your own log files with all the 
careful checks you normally do when writing the logging part of your 
program. You just printf() it. That's all.

If an init system ever needs extra functionality, then its logging. It 
wouldn't be much: Collecting everything the programs prints to stdout or 
stderr, queuing it until syslog is up and running and handing it over.

I'd really appreciate some kind of logging functionality in the init system 
I use. Not only could I eventually integrate qmail/tinydns/dnscache with 
the rest, I'd also know for sure that my log messages are really recorded 
where I find them. 

Just IMHO, of course. :-)

Thanks,
	Eric

On Tuesday 27 November 2007, Scott James Remnant <scott at netsplit.com> wrote:
> > > Logging ... Err, we have perfectly good logging daemons in Linux
> > > already
> > > - why invent another and why build it into pid#1 ?
> >
> > Well, there's no reason to implement it, but there's no general
> > facility for that InitNG, that's why it says "Limited". I like to
> > have a generic interface for this just because some embedded systems do
> > not have syslog, in these cases it could be replaced by a simplistic
> > logging plug-in.
>
> All systems can have syslog() it's in the libc, and there are various
> daemon implementations -- many of which are small enough for embedded
> uses.
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