retitle Move de facto "compress" default into logrotate.conf submitter 656060 !
On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 15:24:18 +0200 Christian Göttsche <cgzo...@googlemail.com> wrote: > I think extX is still the default for filesystems. So the compress > option makes sense in the general case. The request here is to: 1. Enable "compress" in logrotate.conf. 2. (Request that maintainers and/or NMU to) Drop "compress" in package's /etc/logrotate.d/* files. Thus, compression would still be enabled by default. But this gives users a _single_ place to toggle this globally, rather than needing to toggle it in every package's /etc/logrotate.d/* configuration file. The user might want to disable log compression for any number of reasons; some examples being: A) They have a filesystem doing copy-on-write snapshots. B) They have tons of disk space and don't need the compression. C) They want to make it easier to grep the files. In the Root-on-ZFS HOWTOs that I maintain, I recommend people turn it off for reason A. At $DAYJOB, we use ext4 but turn off log compression for reason C (and the implied B). > p.s.: @Richard Laager: I quite did not get the point with the snapshots. 1. Write a log file to disk. Let's say that's 10 MB. It takes up 10 MB on disk. 2. Take a snapshot. With copy-on-write, this takes no new space. 3. Compress the log file. Let's say the compressed version takes 1 MB. On a traditional filesystem, step 3 wrote 1 MB but freed 10 MB, for a net savings of 9 MB. On a copy-on-write filesystem with snapshots, step 3 wrote 1 MB and freed 0 MB (as the original uncompressed file exists in one or more snapshots), for a net _cost_ of 1 MB. This is the exact opposite of the goal of enabling compression. -- Richard
