access to /var/log/messages

[William Jensen <jensenb@charter.net>]

Greetings Debians,

I'd like to give access to the directory /var/log/messages to my user account
so I can watch what messages are being displayed there.  I'd do this with tail
-f /var/log/messages.  Problem is my user accnt has no permissions on that
directory.  I could change the permissions on the directory itself but then
any other user can look into that data and I'd rather not have that.
Therefore is it wise policy to add my user account to the 'root' group?  Would
that solve the problem while maintaining system security?  Or is there a
better way of achieving this?  And how would I go about adding myself to the
root group...modify /etc/group?

Thanks,

Bill