Bug#2881: syslogd doesn't treat pipes correctly

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Austin Donnelly writes ("Bug#2881: syslogd doesn't treat pipes correctly"):
> However, if /dev/xconsole has not been opened for reading when syslogd
> opens it to write, syslogd closes it and does not re-open it.
>
> This makes the pipe facility semi-useless. Any time you wish to see
> output from a pipe, you need to SIGHUP the syslogd.
>
> Can this please be fixed in the next release?

If I could explain in a little more detail what I think the desirable
behaviour would be:

I'd like syslog to try to open the pipe for writing, or perhaps for
both at once, and to discard output while there are no readers (eg, by
catching or ignoring SIGPIPE and by ignoring EPIPE).

That way when something did get to connect to xconsole it would start
getting whatever messages were there.

I think this behaviour should be enabled by the | logfile modifier in
syslog.conf.

Ian.