Re: dpkg.log

[Ben Collins <bmc@visi.net>]

On Fri, Jan 01, 1999 at 04:54:34AM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
>
> Bad. There are two issues with logging:
> 1 - dpkg does no logging at all. This is too bad, since it would be very
> nice to have a logfile with logs operations on packages (installation,
> removing, etc.)

Dpkg doesn't have to. And even if it did, it would only be very
generic pkg info - what was installed, when, etc. I'm not sure you
could make a mechanism _in_ dpkg that packages could easily use to log
custom info.

> 2 - A lot of packages want to tell the user something when they are
> being installed. This should be done either during the configuration
> stage, or afterwards.
They could still do this, nothing says that they can't output to both,
just the log file keeps it for later.

> Also a hardcoded logfile-location is silly, I might want to log things
> like this on a central server, or not at all.
Well, using the suggestion from some one else, if you used logger and a
set log level to output to (the same the pppd has) such as localN then
syslog can be setup to send that out put to a central server or drop it
accordingly. The base in syslog can be used to send it initially to
/var/log/dpkg.log. The admin can easily change where it goes from
there.

> This should really be on debian-admintool, and I've set the reply-to
> accordingly.

If this was about changing dpkg or apt, I would agree. However, this is
more of a change in how things are already for packages themselves.

--
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Ben Collins <b.m.collins@larc.nasa.gov>                  Debian GNU/Linux
UnixGroup Admin - Jordan Systems Inc.                 bcollins@debian.org
------ -- ----- - - -------   ------- -- The Choice of the GNU Generation