On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 11:43:28AM +0100, Klaus Ethgen wrote: > The solution of #609780 breaks all log analysing tools. More over it > makes no sense to log the PID twice in the logs.
Breaks "all" seems rather harsh (and untrue, we did review logcheck). Anyway, if a log analysing tool breaks because of this change you should bug *them*, not us. The cron log format is not set on stone and (in Debian) they will have until the next release to adapt. Please bear in mind that this is Debian's unstable, and our interest is to improve CRON not to keep log analysis tools happy. > In logfiles the PID is expected direct behind the binary and is recorded > by the syslog (The PID is part of syslog protocol). Putting the same PID > in the message do not only add redundancy that is not needed, it breaks > other tools too as log analysing tools or intrusion detection systems. You don't seem to have read the bug report that motivate the change and you don't seem to understand the change fully either. The goal of the change is to add in the log messages the PID of the child processes so tools that analyse the cron log's output can actually determine how much time did a task take to run. Before the change the PID that is in the syslog is not good enough to analyse the logs generated because of the way that cron behaves. For reference please see /usr/share/doc/cron/examples/cron-stats.pl which has not been adapted (yet) to the change. Without the information we are providing *now* tools can just "wild guess" what the PID of the cron child who executes the cron task is. > Please revoke that broken patch. We will not "revoke" that patch. We might adjust it to avoid redundant information (for the 'CMD' call at least) but it is certainly our intention to keep the change. I will repeat it again: it is not such an intrusive change and if log analysis tools break because of these change, they have plenty of time to be bugged and fixed. As log analysis software tool authors know, it is *their* tool to keep with the pace of changes in the format of log messages generated by the software. Regards Javier
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
