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

[Panu Matilainen]

On 11/22/2012 05:42 AM, Thierry Vignaud wrote:
> Hi

Hi,

You had a typo in the mailing list address: 'pm-main at lists.rpm.org' but 
apparently some catchall-alias sent it to me afterall. Since rpm-maint 
was obviously the intent, replying to the list.

> 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

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. 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.

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. 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.

-- 
     - Panu -