On Wed, 17.07.13 12:24, Matthew Miller (mattdm@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@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