On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 01:21:28PM +0200, Jan Stary wrote: > Laughably, I got bitten again: > > The selector field is separated from the action field > by one or more tab characters. > > A tab is a tab, not a few spaces. Again, I copied > a syslog.conf line from another xterm after an upgrade > and spent half an hour wondering why my logfile stays empty. > > This is entirely user error, but anyway: > is it on purpose that we require the separators > to be tabs, not spaces? I understand this is > what the original syslog had.
This may cause compatibility issues and head-scratching if you switch to a replacement. There are some in the ports tree, I don't know if they support spaces. More over, looks like it's intentional, more or less. Yes, it does mean that those fields may contain spaces. And the rest of the config file parser looks like it's very thorough (zaps trailing spaces and all that). > Would there be any opposition to also allowing spaces? > The '\t' seems to be hardcoded into usr.sbin/syslogd.c > but it seems easy enough to extend it to allow ' ' as well. > > If we stay with tabs only, should the manpage emphasize "not spaces"? "tab character" means exactly what it does. Sorry that it got you, but NO WAY.
