Bug#326421: preprocess config files with m4

[Tom Metro]

Paul Martin wrote:
It seems the cleaner approach would be patching logrotate so that it
calls to an external script to obtain the list of log files...
`/usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles --weekly` {
        weekly

Something like this is a possibility, but there's a lot of work 
involved.

OK. Could you pass this upstream so I could get their take on the matter 
before I commit the time to making a patch?


But an even simpler solution, which could be implemented with a fairly 
small and localized patch, would be to preprocess config files with m4 
before logrotate processes them. Then the above becomes:

esyscmd(/usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles --weekly) {
        weekly

This, definitely, is not. logrotate can't depend on m4 because of its 
status. logrotate is a "must have" package, whereas m4 isn't.

Is there any alternative that does fall under the "must have" category? 
awk? perl? (Though neither could do preprocessing without also supplying 
a script implementing the preprocessor, making it a less clean solution.)

Is m4 considered a substantial enough package that it couldn't become 
"must have", or is that status only achieved after years of fighting for 
inclusion?

 -Tom


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