At 9:54 AM -0400 9/8/07, Bruce Bodger wrote:
Timo,
Compiled and installed v1.0.4 this morning on OS X 10.4.10...
./configure --with-ssldir=/System/Library/OpenSSL --with-ssl=openssl --with-notify=kqueue
...all is well.
I wonder if you remember the conversation that we had back on May 11. This was the situation where after the system ran nightly maintenance dovecot info stopped appearing in mail.log (I'm being careful how I state that: I believe you had surmised a problem with Apple's syslogd implementation.
If you run them, you would also note that Postfix, BIND, INN, and MIMEDefang all suffer from the same problem. In fact, I don't know of any non-Apple daemon that does not have this problem. I believe it is a bug in Apple's ground-up re-implementation of system logging in Tiger.
The condition is a silent failure for clients of the syslog subsystem using the BSD standard (i.e. portable) API. There's no feedback from the system to alert a caller to syslog() that the call didn't actually result in anything getting written to a log file, since the call returns no value and doesn't set errno. The only way a program could know of the failure would be to trace the syslog configuration and look for whether messages are appearing, then take action (probably calling closelog() and openlog()) as needed. Alternatively, a program might just do that as housekeeping every few minutes, but that seems like an awfully busy bit of accommodation for a broken OS subsystem.
In short: Apple needs to fix this. It's their bug, created by their decision to replace traditional BSD syslog with fresh new code written by people who couldn't be bothered to look at what had been done by others before them or at how their code interoperated with existing widely used software. Just like the embarrassment called LaunchD, ASL is the replacement of a *very mature* set of software with software that in the same metaphor might best be termed *infantile*. Hopefully both will at least reach juvenile or adolescent status in Leopard...
--
Bill Cole
bill@scconsult.com