Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 10:35:22 -0500 (CDT) From: Igor Roshchin <igor@physics.uiuc.edu> To: gaylord@gaylord.async.vt.edu (Clark Gaylord) Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syslogd and syslog.conf Message-ID: <199810151535.KAA09617@alecto.physics.uiuc.edu> In-Reply-To: <199810151408.KAA22591@gaylord.async.vt.edu> from "Clark Gaylord" at "Oct 15, 1998 10: 8:20 am"
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Hi, folks! I hope this will be the last message I am writing - to answer all the questions. (I spent much more time on all e-mails then I planned to and then I actually had) Since this discussion was on both mail-lists : stable and security (sorry, I don't read current - don't know what's going there now), I am writing to both lists. (sorry if this is inappropriate) I exchanged e-mails with Jordan (jkh) and David (dg), and I think that we agreed on that it's a bit late for this change to make it to the 3.0-release, so let's hold until after the release is out, and then this change will be committed. Thanks to everybody who expresed their useful (pros and cons) opinions. If you are not too bored yet, you can read the rest of the e-mail, where I kind of summarize all the points made. IgoR > > > > Yuck! > > > > BSDI's syslogd can handle spaces in syslog.conf just fine. Ours > > should too. > > > > This isn't a new feature, it's a long-overdue bug fix. > > I could only agree if we say in very large, bold letters: TABS ARE > THE STANDARD, USUAL FORMAT. USE SPACE AT YOUR OWN PERIL. No problem with that. I just wonder, why people are so conservative if it comes to some kind of "tradition". Everybody who is against changes is mostly providing their emotions (except the only objective reason - to have a cross-platform syslog.conf compatible with "old giants" like SunOS, AIX, ..) Some people say why the tabs can be better (it saves space, i/o time), but then why don't leave it to the sysadmin to decide - what he/she wants to use in the actual syslogd.conf, while providing her/him with the syslogd which can understand both ways. NOBODY so far provided with any reason 1) why it is bad to have syslogd understanding both just tabs and any mixture of tabs and spaces. 2) why "tabs only" scenario was used in the first place for the syslog.conf, and 3) it was not used for other config files in /etc - (name your favorites) (The only possible idea for 2) which I can come up with - in the old days people were in a tough on disk space, but that's just an idea which does not explain 3) ) It looks to me that the answer to 2) and 3) is: "It just happened to be that way, because the author of the syslogd just wrote that way" Now, why one wants to bother to do the changes. 1) MANY people make this mistake, learning it "hard way". (after not having such restriction with othe config files, you think that this is logical to have both tabs and spaces allowed, or at least intuitive) Note, that it's easy to miss in the man pages that only tabs are allowed as separators. (It is not written in capital letters, as Clark suggests ;) ) 2) Cut-N-Paste procedure is usable if the spaces are allowed. (via X features, screen's buffer, or any other means which read the layout of the text from the screen without differentiation between tabs ans spaces) After all, since this change does not brake the old behavior - everybody is free to chose - what style of syslog.conf to use. For the sake of completeness of my summary: Remark (after Cy's and somebody's else e-mails - sorry don't remember the name): Since the new syslogd is fully backwards compatible, and it is not the only program in FreeBSD which has "extended" behavior in comparison to the counterparts in other systems, there is no need to call it a different name, nor provide this feature as a separate command line option. > > No, more seriously, tab-delimited is the usual means of formatting > a text "database" file, and there are potentially non-system routines > that will break with this "fix". I don't know that a lot of > sysadmins actually try to make sense of syslogd.conf, but in general > if you have a fixed number of fields of data that require delimiting, > tab and colon are the usual delimiters; using space begs one to > use multiple spaces, and then you run into having to consider > "[ ]+" or, worse yet " [ ]*", when parsing said file. Let's not make hypothetical guesses. Read the previous e-mails again to find what is proposed. Nobody suggests to use spaces _inside_ the fields of the syslog.conf. The only change that tab characters used as the separator between the two fields of syslog.conf can (not must!) be replaced with spaces. If it was not clear, why would not you take a look at the changes yourself ? > > Again, we could make syslogd able to read space delimited, but I > think advising one to use space instead of tab in syslogd.conf > would be a mistake. Nobody advises to do that. But many people DO (inadvertently). So for their sake, and for the sake of saving time of everybody - who makes the mistake, and who explains how to do it right - the proposed feature should be added. > > -- > Clark K. Gaylord > Blacksburg, Virginia USA > cgaylord@vt.edu > Best Regards, IgoR To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message
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