[Bug 794727] Re: Please symlink /var/log/messages to syslog

[André Pirard]

If you remove /var/log/messages you must also update 13.500.000 Web pages that refer to it.
You just can't tell the general user to constantly scrutinize bug comments and update his rsyslog.conf.
Unless Ubuntu is only for geeks...

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Title:
  Please symlink /var/log/messages to syslog

Status in “rsyslog” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: rsyslog

  After upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04 I found out that the file /var/log/messages contains nothing and is 0 bytes long. /var/log/messages.1 contains the last messages before the upgrade.
  Fearing that something went wrong I checked, if the disk is full and if the syslog daemon running. All looked fine, so googled and found this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10674332 and reading the rsyslog changelog (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rsyslog/4.6.4-2ubuntu4) I found out, it is I intentionally change. I strongly oppose this change. /var/log/messages is a long established logfile and available on most unix systems. I can't really buy the performance argument. If the system is logging something it is awake anyway,because it still has to write to /var/log/syslog. If the system is idle it does not log. So I don't see much overhead in logging to two files. Moreover in contrast to the catch-all /var/log/syslog files, which containes a lot of useless information (failed authentications, etc..) it is much easier to spot a real problem in the extract, which /var/log/messages provides.

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