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Bug#818960: Support syslog(3) instead of xdm.log



Package: xdm
Version: 1:1.1.11-1
Severity: minor

I run a farm of diskless kiosks,
so I want logs to go to a central syslog server,
not the volatile local /var/log/xdm.log.

>From reading the source I learnt to trick xdm into logging to stdout,
which systemd then forwards on to journald (and then to rsyslog).

    # systemctl cat xdm
    [Service]
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/xdm -nodaemon -error ""

But because xdm expects to log to a dumb text file,
it still includes its own severity, PID and timestamp on each line:

    # journalctl -u xdm -o short-iso
    [...]
    2016-03-22T18:30:45+1100 alef xdm[273]: Tue Mar 22 18:30:45 2016 xdm info (pid 365): sourcing /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup
    2016-03-22T18:38:29+1100 alef xdm[273]: Tue Mar 22 18:38:29 2016 xdm info (pid 365): sourcing /etc/X11/xdm/Xstartup
    [...]
                                            |------------------------------------------| Yukky!
    |-------------------------------------| this metadata is added by journald/rsyslog


This is annoying.

Please extend xdm to allow logging via syslog(3).

If that's too hard, please at least let me opt-out of
timestamp/severity/pid prelude from xdm/error.c:LogHeader().

Note that debian/patches/20_xdm_log_timestamp.diff is involved.


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