Re: Bug#1084924: Draft Ballot Re: Bug#1084924: The system-log-daemon virtual package

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> Tue, 17 Dec 2024 10:42:37 +0800

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.ctte
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello,

On Sun 15 Dec 2024 at 06:23pm +01, Helmut Grohne wrote:

>> A) The Technical Committee affirms that it is reasonable for a package to
>> declare any suitable dependency upon the system-log-daemon virtual package.
>> The Technical Committee suggests that Policy be updated to clarify this, and
>> that maintainers who removed such dependencies as a result of the mass bug
>> filing consider restoring them.
>
> This resolution does not make sense on its own to me, because the most
> common case - using journald as your only logging daemon - is not
> covered by this resolution. In the IRC meeting we considered augmenting
> it with a systemd-journald-is-syslog dummy package that Provides:
> system-log-daemon and Depends: systemd-sysv.

Yes, I think this does need to be in there.

> Whilst this resolution sounds reasonable to me. I don't think it can be
> understood in a good way without adding more context. As such, I
> recommend adding a rationale section to it. I propose the following
> text:
>
>     Whether logging is available no longer is a boolean. A container
>     runtime can provide a /dev/log service by forwarding to an external
>     logging service. Many systems now use journald as their only logging
>     daemon, but journald can also cooperate with another logging daemon.
>     Removing dependencies on system-log-daemon should be seen as a
>     recognition that the availability of a logging daemon can no longer
>     reasonably be expressed using the dependency system. Additionally,
>     most log message producers fail gracefully in the absence of a log
>     consumer by skipping logging.

That's a lot of additional text :)  We should probably keep the options
all about the same length?

-- 
Sean Whitton

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