[Logcheck-devel] future directions with logcheck-database (was: Bug#299701: Moving a rule to its package ?)

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Olivier Berger <olivier.berger at it-sudparis.eu> [2008.04.17.1114 +0200]:
> I'm not sure I get the rationale here... I'm not so familiar with the
> diversions. Could you point me to reference docs ?

No "reference" docs that I know, but
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=61663 and plenty of
discussions on mailing lists etc.

> Anyway, this seems too bad... Maybe the logcheck rules shoudln't
> be dpkg conffiles ?

If we start using diversions, then we're going to have multiple
rulesets for a single package's log messages, and that's going to
make it *really* hard to figure out when logcheck doesn't behave
like it should.

I am not in favour.

Right now, maintaining logcheck-database is a pain because of
redundancy and all other kinds of mess. Thus, I wouldn't mind if
maintainers took over some of that work.

If logcheck finally got a macro system and we could just say e.g.
@IP@ instead of coming up with a new regexp to match an IP address
every time, it would be a lot easier to maintain logcheck-database
and everyone would be happy.

See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=376106 for some
ideas and a reference implementation.

I think that implementing this would be a major step in logcheck
development and would be the best use of any time, rather than to
discuss where rules should be.

> May I suggest to document some guidelines for Debian packagers
> explaining some policy regarding such cases (i.e. where should the
> rules be ;).

There's wiki.logcheck.org and www.logcheck.org. I am glad to give
out direct commit access to the latter, or commit patches I receive.

I can't make the time to work on this myself, unfortunately,
anymore. I've invested hundreds of hours into logcheck but I can't
anymore.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
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