Hi Daniel, On Tue, Jan 06, 2026 at 04:42:57PM +0100, Daniel Swarbrick wrote: > Apologies for the late reply. Yesterday I uploaded > prometheus-postfix-exporter 0.17.0-1 to unstable, and I am currently running > it on a small home mail server. I was previously running 0.12.1-1 for the > last few months, with systemd log source enabled, and I observed no > showstopper issues. I think that the systemd log support is finally mature > enough that we can enabled it by default.
Thank you. > Using the systemd log source is still opt-in (via the --systemd.enable > flag). I have not studied the source code thoroughly enough to say whether > we could patch this flag to be enabled by default. I don't know whether that > would fail gracefully on non-systemd systems. For now, I think it's safest > to merely add that flag to the systemd service file. I see no reason to have > separate ARGS in /etc/default if we can basically just do this in the > service: > > ExecStart=/usr/bin/prometheus-postfix-exporter --systemd.enable $ARGS I agree with the reasoning and the conclusions. Would you mind adding this change to the next upload? > As far as the Depends in d/control, these need a bit of a cleanup. Currently > we have redundant stuff like "rsyslog | system-log-daemon", which could > obviously just be "system-log-daemon". However, we should not force that > upon systemd systems, so perhaps this should be "systemd | > system-log-daemon", since the systemd package contains systemd-journald. When using virtual packages such as system-log-daemon it actually is useful to have specify a real alternative such as syslog first. Doing so ensures that apt does not select an implementation at random. I recommend keeping the rsyslog alternative. A while ago, there was a discussion about whether systemd should be providing system-log-daemon. If it were doing so, it would no longer be coinstallable with rsyslog, but combining journald with rsyslog is a sensible option. Therefore it still does not do that. Unfortunately, that means that depending on system-log-daemon now tends to install more than is typically needed. While systemd contains the journald binary, you can reasonably install the systemd packages on systemd running another init system where it would not actually be run. I suggest using systemd-sysv instead. So the dependency should become one of the following: * systemd-sysv | rsyslog | system-log-daemon * rsyslog | systemd-sysv | system-log-daemon I am not sure which of these is better. On systems where systemd-sysv is installed, both should work the same way and skip installing further packages. On other systems, the former might try replacing the init system. If that happens, the latter dependency is better. Helmut
