[Rpm-maint] [PATCH] add syslog support to rpm (when installing/removing packages)

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 22 November 2012 09:19, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at redhat.com> wrote:
>> The following patch adds syslog support to rpm
>> (logging installing/removing packages).
>>
>> It was proposed a year ago and Panu asked a little cleaning:
>> http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/2011-March/002995.html
>>
>> Here's the cleaned version.
>> I've also added some historic notes.
>> Commenting out %_transaction_syslog_ident disables it.
>>
>> Please apply to master as well as to rpm-4.11 branch
>
> Sorry for not commenting on the (privately sent) patch earlier, just been
> busy with other stuff.
>
> For a long time I had no idea whether you were going to do anything about
> the syslog patch so I went ahead and played around with it a bit on my own.
> A major issue nobody noticed or at least commented on in the previous round
> is that this ends up logging way too much:
>
> Test transactions are getting logged, this is not good: if I as a regular
> user run 'rpm -e --test --nodeps --allmatches glibc', that really must NOT
> be logged, but that's what happens currently:
>
> Nov 22 09:36:53 localhost lt-rpm: [RPM] erase glibc-2.14.90-24.fc16.9.i686
> Nov 22 09:36:53 localhost lt-rpm: [RPM] erase glibc-2.14.90-24.fc16.9.x86_64

We could test for RPMTRANS_FLAG_TEST

> Largely similar to 1), operations on chroots and non-system database get
> logged identically to everything else. For example just executing the rpm
> test-suite as a regular user emits tons of stuff in the syslog - not good.
>
> Whether chroot operations should be logged at all I dunno: there are
> situations where you might want it (such as during initial system install)
> and then there are those where you probably dont want it. At the very least
> the chroot needs to be logged as well. Another quirk is the rpmdb path: if
> you do a --justdb install/erase of packages on an alternative db path, that
> shouldn't be logged.

I don't agree for the justdb case (but we can skip logging if
RPMTRANS_FLAG_JUSTDB
flag is set)

> But then... what if somebody does something like:
> # cp -avp /var/lib/rpm /tmp/junkdb
> # rpm -Uvh --dbpath /tmp/junkdb nastypackage.rpm
> (or erase something)
>
> That would modify the actual system but leave the system rpmdb unaware of
> those changes, and should be logged, along with the rpmdb path that was
> used.

Indeed
So we agree that most stuff should actually be logged :-)

> And while adding logs, there are a bunch of other things we arguably should
> log as well. At least:
>
> - Transaction start and stop, along with the transaction id. That makes it
> easyish to see things like "here's a transaction that started but didn't
> finish, so rpm has crashed or gotten killed while installing".
> - Package scriptlet failures
> - Rebuilds of the system rpmdb
> - Bunch of other information about the transactions:
>   - select parts of active configuration (eg the rpmdb path)
>   - select transaction flags, such as whether scriptlet execution was
> disabled, disk-space calculations ignored, file replacement forced etc
>   - other things that seem like flags but are not in the librpm API, such as
> the effect of --nodeps and --noorder
>
> I've a work-in-progress patch to do some of the things here, but its nowhere
> near complete.

Can we see it?

> And with all the plugin-discussions going around, I've
> started thinking of pushing the whole logging thing into a plugin. So there
> would be a "reference rpm logging plugin" that does roughly the above
> shipped with rpm, distros get to choose whether to use that or something
> more specialized.

I would like a decision to be taken for rpm-4.11.
We carry this patch for nearly 12 years and several people are interested in it.
Since there's no plugin for the moment, we could put it in rpm-4.11, then
enhance it later (--test case, transactions, ...).