Outdated in Natty, please merge from Sid

I agree we should have this in Natty, but it's simply too late for such a jump in versions. I've targeted this to Oneiric. Perhaps someone can build a version for Natty and host in a PPA?

Once it's in Oneiric, this would be an excellent candidate for natty-backports.

Is this same issue relevant to the missing /var/log/messages discussion here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1728570?

the link posted above in post #4 is talking about the way ubuntu dev rsyslog maintainer have set logs to eliminate redondant & useless messages into various logs, its user understandable if the useless categories were removed too instead of letting them empty and let users thinking that something is borked.

That is the initial problem, but here the bug report only request the latest stable release to be merged from Sid, so nothing related to the previous link.

Why is /var/log/messages disabled in Natty Narwhal?? That's THE place, to look if you feel that something is not going well.

When I upgraded to natty something went wrong, so I was looking into the logs (=/var/log/messages). When I saw that it is empty I was shure that the system ist definitely fucked up, if not even the logging is working.

Philipp, the logs you're looking for are in /var/log/syslog. This was a deliberate decision in natty to reduce log duplication (everything logged to /var/log/messages was always being logged to /var/log/syslog as well).

So what about softlinking it instead of defunctioning? Isnt messages a
standard you should respect?

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 03:16:13PM -0000, Philipp Gassmann wrote:
> So what about softlinking it instead of defunctioning?

I don't think a heavyweight transition here is warranted. Any backwards
compatibility solution we would implement would bring its own set of
problems (breaking external log rotation scripts, e.g.); IMHO it's really
better in this case to have a clean break.

> Isnt messages a standard you should respect?

No, it's no standard, only a convention.

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Just to understand the motive of the decision: what do you think makes breaking a convention so less worse than breaking a standard?

Purpose of syslog and messages are two different. I don't think its good to mix those. /var/log/messages is the usual place to all system software messages, non-kernel boot issues, and messages that go to 'dmesg'. Purpose of the syslog is to be the audit log and it will log everything and that's why you would fine every thing in /var/log/messages in the syslog. If you consider that as duplication of messages, I don't think that's correct.

As I don't think the last discussion belongs to this bug, I created bug #794727 for the empty /var/log/messages file.

get a new upgrade as per Bug #794230

so i close that report now