On 2013-04-09 12:11:55 +0100, Paul Martin wrote: > On Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 08:20:49PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > One part of the bug is that logrotate rotates the log files instead > > of not changing anything if it incorrectly guesses that a file has > > been written in the future. So, if the timezone changes several > > times (e.g. during a travel), some logs may be lost, even recent > > ones, while they would normally be kept e.g. for several weeks! > > Logs are important data. Losing logs is not acceptable. > > It's not the intention to protect system administrators against the > consequences of their own policies.
This is completely stupid. Changing the timezone should never have bad consequences. Changing the timezone should be regarded as something normal in a mobile context. > Severity minor because it only affects a minority of users. I disagree that a bug trashing data should be minor, even if it affects a minority of users. > This is not a grave bug as it is the system administrator's choice to > change local timezone, and they should be aware of the consequences of > how that affects cron jobs. What consequences? RTFM: Normally, logrotate is run as a daily cron job. It will not modify a log more than once in one day unless the criterion for that log is based on the log's size and logrotate is being run more than once each day, or unless the -f or --force option is used. which is not how it behaves. According to you, system administrators shouldn't rely on the documentation... Great! > It's also telling you that it's doing what it's doing, rather than > silently losing data. Yes, but it may be too late. > The "time in future" warning is there to advise of a broken system > clock, not against a system administrator intentionally breaking that > clock. Here the system is *not* broken. The timezone has changed. That's all. And it's possible to check that. > The alternative is a system that potentially never rotates its > log files. > > cron runs in the system's local timezone, hence logrotate follows what > cron does. Again, I repeat: THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS WITH CRON. **ONLY** LOGROTATE IS BROKEN. > I've given you a workaround that will help you. which has side effects. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
