[Logcheck-devel] Unsure about the responsibility of Bug # 260660 - logcheck entry missing

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 09:22:17AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Marc Haber <mh+logcheck-devel at zugschlus.de> [2009.08.31.0840 +0200]:
> > How many packages actually do this?
> 
> Not enough to make logcheck-database obsolete. That package should
> really just not exist, IMHO.

Agreed, but how does one motivate other maintainers to ship their own
 configuration?

> We don't have cron-database, or pam-database, or logrotate-database,

These are needed for the package to function. logcheck and/or aide are
just security features, and most package maintainers don't care.

otoh, there is a number of packages (for example, mailman, request
tracker etc) that would profit from shipping exim4-config snippets,
and even those don't do it.

> or a package to install init.d scripts for daemons that don't do it
> themselves.

dh_installinit?

> Apart from extra work for the logcheck team, having hundreds of
> files in logcheck-database means a lot more work for logcheck to
> process filters that are designed for messages that are never
> generated on systems that don't have most of the packages installed.
> 
> And it makes no sense to me to have to update logcheck-database
> every time one of those packages provides a new upstream version or
> otherwise changes the format of the log messages.

How can we motivate people to do more of this in the future?

> Obviously, all of this would make even more sense if logcheck had
> proper macros/templates, so that maintainers should just saty
> @IPV4_ADSRESS@ instead of having to contribute yet another regular
> expression that matches some, but not all, IPv4 addresses, as well
> as an indeterminate amount of non-IPv4-address text. Yes, I have
> seen .{,15} be used, as well as [^[:space:]]*.

Yes, templates would be nice to have.

> > Marc, aide maintainer, with zero packages shipping their own
> > rules, and exim4 maintqainer, with zero packages shipping their
> > own exim config snippets
> 
> If you're like to change that, we're happy to work through the
> transition with you.

I still don't have the slightest clue which approach to choose.

Greetings
Marc

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