Hi providers of system-log-daemon,
when I started packaging rsyslog for Debian I based /etc/rsyslog.conf on what's been in /etc/syslog.conf at that time (as provided by the no longer
existing sysklogd).
Unfortunately, this also meant, there was a lot of duplication (say mail messages being logged to 4 different files) and no one could explain to me,
why we had this duplication / particular setup.
I tried to clean that up for rsyslog during the bookworm release cycle.
My guiding principle was to have a single log file containing everything (minus security sensitive information) and separate log files for commonly
used facilities that are in use as of today.
I ended up with
#
# Log anything besides private authentication messages to a single log file
#
*.*;auth,authpriv.none -/var/log/syslog
#
# Log commonly used facilities to their own log file
#
auth,authpriv.* /var/log/auth.log
cron.* -/var/log/cron.log
kern.* -/var/log/kern.log
mail.* -/var/log/mail.log
user.* -/var/log/user.log