[Zope-Coders] new zLOG

[Chris McDonough]

Guido wrote:

> 1. Give the 'stupid log file' its proper name back. This is another
> > reason why writing to a file is a stupid way to do event logging.
> 
> Yes please.  There are way too many places that currently have to look
> for two envvars where one would be enough.

I'm not sure what Toby means by this.  I don't think it's the envvar
thing (which is another topic entirely ;-)

Assuming he means the event logger is still "stupid", that's not true
anymore.  Due entirely to Vinay Sajip, it can log to a file, syslog,
http, nt event log, mail, and so on.  It can log to them simultaneously
to difference places as necessary and has lots of other knobs and
dials.  The ZLogger package, which previously handled syslog logging,
has been removed from the Zope trunk as a result, and that duty has been
moved into the event logger.

The only "stupid" thing about the event logger now is its need to use
environment variables for configuration.  In Zope 2.7, we will not be
using environment variables for its configuration anymore, so as far as
I can tell it will be entirely unstupified when used by Zope.  To what
degree we can make this a reality under ZEO and ZRS is still an open
question.

Toby wrote:

> > 2. Accept that Zope currently gives up root privelidges far too
> > late. This is a bug with the privelidge dropping, not with the
> > logging. Even worse, Zope currently writes a few ZODB transactions
> > as root too.

I'll share some of my pain about this.  Last night I was at work with
Ken until about 9pm helping a customer discover (via
remote-control-of-a-human) that they shouldn't be starting their ZEO
server as root in their configuration.

It needs to be fixed, and, for Zope, it even *has* been fixed on a
branch.  I hope to convince folks to see a need for it in ZEO as well.

On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 08:59, Toby Dickenson wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 November 2002 1:41 pm, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> > I propose that there be some interface where Zope (or any setuid
> > program) can call e.g. zLOG.initialize_later() immediately after
> > importing zLOG, and if this hasn't been called by the time LOG() is
> > called for the first time, the first LOG() call calls initialize().
> 
> I dispute the need for this interface.
> 
> It should be easy to find potential calls to LOG before such a program drops 
> root. If so, it should also be easy to disable those calls in the 
> application, rather than at ZLOG level.
> 
> If it is not easy to find out exactly what your program does before dropping 
> root privelidges then you already have bigger problems.

Guido later said in response:

> I don't disagree.  I was just throwing Chris a bone, since he cares
> much about this issue.  I also note that calling initialize() from the
> first LOG() call requires having a global variable whose value
> indicates whether this is the first LOG() call; all my proposed
> interface would add is a defined API to set this variable to pretend
> the first LOG() call has already happened. :-)

This is fine with me (API or no API). As long as "import zLOG" does not
potentially write a file, I can work around the rest of the issues.

Tks,

- C