Comment 24 for bug 1743592

On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 01:41:42PM -0000, T Jeske wrote:
> Will it log as ::ffff:10.1.2.3 if IPv6 is disabled on the system?

I believe so, yes.

> I could imagine this notation could confuse some tools for automatic
> analyses of logfiles. I fear that this would break something in the
> background without people even realizing it until it is too late. Imo
> failing hard should be the preferred option.

I agree this isn't ideal. But ultimately, log file syntax does change
over time, tooling needs to be updated, and the time to make changes is
in new Ubuntu releases (rather than existing ones). So in principle I
think it's acceptable to make this change even though some log analysis
may fail until those analysers are updated.

However, it does seem quite late in the day to make this change for
Focal. It gives us less time to find tooling in the archive that may
need updating, and less time for the out-of-archive community to adjust,
too. Thomas has expressed the same opinion to me on IRC. So on that
basis, it looks like we'll be keeping the status quo for Focal, and
maybe changing it in Focal+1.