[Dovecot] BUG REPORT - Stops logging after sleep

[Bill Cole]

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 at scconsult.com