Suggestion: more choices about the redirection of service

[xhebox]

task    [2345] log <svc/sbin/syslogd> /sbin/ifup -a                      -- Networking

Redirecting to syslog is now the only choice, right?Could not there be more choices , for example none(/dev/null) , /var/log/xx.log(file)?I ran finit on my own distro, and no supported syslog.I like to keep it simple :D

Could it be added in finit?If not, i will close the issue.Or i can try to make a pull request if you're busy.

[troglobit]

Yeah, I've been thinking about this myself. How about the following syntax?

log:null
log:level=debug

[xhebox]

log:null;level=debug
log:/tmp/ss.log;level=normal

Like this?What is the meaning of level?An option?

[troglobit]

Hmm, yeah possibly. I'm a little bit more in favor of redirecting from
level and facility from the syslog daemon.

Let me sleep on it :)

On Sat, Oct 1, 2016, 18:04 xhe notifications@github.com wrote:

log:null;level=debug
log:/tmp/ss.log;level=normal

Like this?

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[troglobit]

The level is the log level for which messages to stdout/stderr are redirected to syslog with. Usually the info level is used, which can then be filtered out using /etc/syslog.conf or /etc/rsyslog.conf, or similar. One could of course redirect stdout to syslog using level=debug, and stderr using level=err, but in my experience developers that use printf()/fprintf() instead of a proper logging framework don't care enough to use stderr only for errors.

Here's my enhanced proposal, slight variant of yours:

# Redirect stderr/stdout to syslog, defaults to facility=user,level=info
service ... log ...

# Redirect stderr/stdout to a log file, facility and level is unused and not applicable
service ... log:/path/to/logfile ...

# Redirect stderr/stdout to syslog as LOG_DAEMON and LOG_CRIT
service ... log:facility=daemon,level=crit ...

With these sub-options to the log command I believe we can cover most cases. Applications writing directly to /dev/console, like udevadm are however impossble to handle this way. Maybe cgroups could be used to prevent acccess, but then again those applications may crash :-/

Another issue with logging to a file, instead of syslog, is that many embedded systems do not have log rotation, so the (ram)disk used for logging can quickly get full. Therefore a separate global setting for log rotation may be in order:

# Max file size for each log file: 100 kiB, rotate out log => log.1 => log.2.gz => log.3.gz => log.4.gz
log size=100k count=4

Adding this kind of logic to Finit is almost like adding support for a full blown syslog daemon, which may be a good idea ;-)

[troglobit]

Note: remember log file rotation, when log:/path/to/logfile is selected, which we already do for utmp files.