On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Rich Bowen wrote:
> > > annoying. So instead of logging to the error log we decided it might
> > > be smart if it used the ident field.
> > Ehhh... too much overloading. Why not stick it in the environment
> > and then use %{something}e to log it?
>
> I don't really see this as overloading at all. The email address is what
> always used to get put into this slot anyways, back when browsers used
> to pass the email address as part of every request.
I won't stand in the way of this change (which certainly improves the
functionality of mod_auth_anon), but here's a couple counter-arguments:
1. What if you want to log both the ident and the password? Your answer
is probably "nobody uses ident anymore". In that case, we may eventually
want to remove this field or deprecate it. If we add other functions to
it, we make that more difficult.
2. Documentation: do we really want to go through everywhere the common
log format is discussed and note that "usually this is the ident, but it
could be the anon password". That would involve adding complication to at
least three different places in the docs.
The environment approach just seems much cleaner to me.
Joshua.
