Re: [bug-inetutils] some suggestions to syslog.conf

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

address@hidden ha escrit:

> the point is that there is a syslog daemon (unknown to me but i found
> the man page!)

The implementation you are referring to is a BSD syslogd.

> > You could easily solve this using M4 though.
> 
> easily??? is M4 easy compared to syslog.conf??? wow???
> sorry, i'm stunned!

There's nothing to be stunned about. Some of the features you
proposed clearly call for a preprocessor. Namely:

>> because there may be many progs and hosts, a group identifier (an alias)
>> would be nice, like:
>> 
>> $inetd-daemons &ftpd,&telnetd,...  # alias the inetd daemons

Using m4 this would mean

define(`inetd-daemons',`&ftpd,&telnetd') # alias the inetd daemons

>> this could also be used to alias facilities and levels:
>> 
>> $danger  =crit,=err
>> $most    *,!auth,!authpriv
define(`danger',`=crit,=err')
define(`most',`*,!auth,!authpriv')

Do you *really* think it is that difficult to write these three defines???

Implementing one's own preprocessor would be a solution inferior to
using the existing one (not to mention the fact that m4 is found on
any UNIX system).

Now, let's consider program name selectors, and hostname specifications,
like these:

     !ftpd
     *.*      /var/log/spoolerr
     +hostname
     *.*      /var/log/hostname

I agree that these have nothing to do with preprocessing and must be
implemented in syslogd itself. Such features are quite often needed
and we should definitely add them to our TODO list.

Regards,
Sergey