sysklogd doesn't use logrotate

[Marty]

Binary package hint: sysklogd

sysklogd should really use logrotate.

syslogd-listfiles is an inflexible way to select specific logs and apply different options to them. It doesn't support monthly rotation at all.

There is no configuration file for syslogd-listfiles which means you have to change /etc/cron.*/sysklogd or even the perl script itself. You then have to deal with merging changes when sysklogd is upgraded.

There have been proposals in Debian to either fix syslogd-listfiles (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=104278) or switch to logrotate (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=44523) but neither have gone anywhere in some time.

[Tom Metro (tmetro+ubuntu)]

For a long time I've used a workaround for this problem that moves all sysklogd generated files to /var/log/syslog/ and then uses this logrotate config file:

/var/log/syslog/*.log {
        olddir /var/log/syslog/old
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
                /etc/init.d/sysklogd reload-or-restart > /dev/null
        endscript
}

Solves the problem cleanly, and I wish Debian would adopt this, but they're understandably concerned about moving the location of common log files.

Another approach would be to patch sysklogd to have a command line option where it will output the definitive list of log files parsed from its config file (supplanting the external shell script hack). Unfortunately you can't simply do `sysklogd --listfiles` in logrotate, due to its inflexibility. (Boggles the mind why a log rotation program was written in C instead of Perl. See also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=326421 and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=353663 )

[Charlie Schluting ☃ (cschluti)]

+1 the original bug report. We need one definitive place to configure rotation and permissions..