Re: [PATCH] service: Honor #:log-file in make-forkexec-constructor.

[Danny Milosavljevic]

On Tue, 6 Sep 2016 14:36:35 +0200
David Craven <address@hidden> wrote:

> Not syslog, but helps with debugging...

That definitely helps - however, in the long run, I think that using syslog is 
better. Syslog does the splitting up in different files (or not) and onto 
different machines (or not), filtering (or not), log rotation etc. So it makes 
sense to make services use syslog instead of rolling-your-own filtering, 
splitting, networking etcetc 267843 times. That said the services should just 
use syslog on their own - we could only guess when a new log message starts.

I checked out the syslog wire format - it's not difficult. The only thing to 
keep in mind is that the local sockets wants a NUL terminator (if it's a stream 
socket) but a network node doesn't (makes sense - the network thing is UDP 
packets and the message is just one packet long). I think always including it 
doesn't hurt.
The prefix is (facility << 3) | priority in angle brackets.

https://www.gnu.org/software/anubis/manual/html_section/anubis_11.html seems to 
already support syslog, maybe we can copy it from there.

https://netkiller.github.io/python/library/syslog.html small public domain 
implementation of syslog client in Python.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5424#section-6.1 lists message length limits.

Or we could pipe the output to "logger" from inetutils.