Bug#642914: debian-policy: 10.8 Log files : logrotate compression should result from good judgment

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Jérôme <jerome.bouat@wanadoo.fr> writes:

> Most of the time I think that log files compression lowers the system
> performance on desktop computers which have now enough disk space for
> storing old logs.

I really doubt there is any noticable effect on a desktop system where the
size of the logs is relatively small.

I think log compression usually makes little difference on non-server
systems (and is quite valuable on server machines, which both generate
much more logs and which are often on VMs with very limited disk
available).  When it does make a difference is when some process goes
insane and logs tons of similar lines, at which point the compression
allows one to retain such logs without much impact, which I think is
valuable.

> I think that files compression is a good tradeoff only in case the
> compressed files have a longer lifetime than the log files (i. e. man
> pages, fonts, Debian packages, ...). For the other cases, the
> compression should result from good judgment.

The maintainer's judgement is what the compression policy is already left
to.  So far as I know, there isn't any requirement in Debian Policy that
rotated log files be compressed; there certainly isn't in 10.8.  There is
an example of a logrotate configuration file that happens to compress the
log files, but that's an example, not a normative requirement.

Unless you want to argue that Policy should require logs *not* be
compressed (which I personally don't think is wise), I don't think there's
anything in Policy to change here.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>