On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 4:26 PM, Marko Cupać <marko.cu...@mimar.rs> wrote: > On Sat, 2 May 2015 16:03:51 -0700 ... > So, while I agree I should read man page and respect instruction about > tabs, it appears it is quite easy to make a mistake and end up with > system that does not log, without obvious reason. > > Is 'tabs only' really necessary? Why are spaces bad? pf for example does > not seem to care if I use spaces or tabs.
Time to brush up on your study of both history and syntax. The syslog.conf format on OpenBSD is backward compatible with the original BSD syslogd. So far the developers haven't felt a need to break that backward compatibility when adding new features (the '!' and '!!' lines), so no one has had to rewrite their syslog.conf during upgrades. OpenBSD isn't afraid of requiring config rewrites (c.f. pf.conf changes) but the benefits have to balance the imposed costs. Forcing everyone to rewrite their syslog.conf just to change whether spaces and tabs are treated the same would be pretty gratuitous, IMO. As for the syntax, with the current format you cannot treat spaces and tabs the same: currently spaces are permitted between token in the selector list. e.g.: kern.debug; syslog,user.info /var/log/messages If spaces and tabs were treated the same that would be interpreted differently. Don't think that's worth it? Hop in your time-machine and go back and convince Eric Allman to treat spaces and tabs the same, preferably both here and in the sendmail.cf format. > Also, wouldn't it be good to have a mechanism to parse conf file and > warn that no logging will be done instead of just throw 'syslogd (ok)' > and quit all the logging? Yeah, that sounds like a nice feature. We look forward to your patch to add that. ;-) Philip Guenther
