Since the first announcement [1] of slew [2], a few people expressed interest in the project, but I have received little feedback regarding its technical contents. Therefore although I have successfully deployed slew on a few real-life systems, it is still quite a slowly moving personal hobby project. However, there are a few changes which I think might be interesting to some people here, which is briefly summarised in this mail, 5 days before the project's one-year anniversary.
[1] <https://skarnet.org/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?2:mss:1945:201803:pdabbgogplcnfhcmpgkg>. [2] <https://gitlab.com/CasperVector/slew>. Previously, slew would only save /run/uncaught-logs/current to /var/log/init (so rotated log files would be ignored) on shutdown (so no saved logs if the system crashed). Now the log-saving mechanism is implemented in an s6-log rotation processor (`init/save_log.rc'), which would do the task with best effort (if /var/log/init is unwritable for too long and the catch-all logger is fed with a large stream, the head of the stream might be discarded anyway). The `local' oneshot and `init/rc.halt' would trigger the mechanism by sending the logger SIGALRM; currently, the remaining issue is that s6-log would not run the processor upon SIGALRM if `current' is empty, so a temporary write failure in /var/log/init plus an unfortunate amount of log (no new bytes after the rotated and unsaved log) would result in discarded logs. Other noteworthy changes: * The issue about slew's fault tolerane mentioned in the original announcement has been largely solved. * "Methods" for polymorphic services are supported: see `lib/fn' and `misc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_cli.rc' for an example. * Information can be passed through the kernel command line to slew: see `lib/kcmd.rc', and `init/{load,save}_clock.rc' for an example. Finally, as some people strongly complained [3] about this issue, I would like to ask for your opinions about the naming convention: what do you prefer, more "standardised" names like `wpa_supplicant.wlan0.log' or easier-to-type names like `wpasup.wlan0.log'? I can switch to a new convention if you overwhelmingly support it or if I find a very convincing argument for it, but I need to be really sure that I would *not* need to change the convention *more than once*. [3] <https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1079878-start-25.html>. Suggestions and questions are welcome. -- My current OpenPGP key: RSA4096/0x227E8CAAB7AA186C (expires: 2020.10.19) 7077 7781 B859 5166 AE07 0286 227E 8CAA B7AA 186C
