- I agree that separate logs really don't work very well; it's very common to find that you have to look in several logs to determine what happened to a specific post. Sure, it's occasionally useful that errors or smtp-failure will show a recent date in ls -l indicating "we have problems", but that's just as easy to accomplish (given a unified log format) with grep and tail. With an appropriate tag for each logger, grepping will give you only that information, and it would be easy to produce more sophisticated tools.
- I put the unified format high on the totem pole; increasing log data is not hard--just add a call to the logger--it's presentation, and especially filtering, to produce information from the raw data that requires thought.
- For the unified format, I think it should be made very easy to track a particular post through the system. This is sufficiently important that I've thought of a format that goes "UID PHASE TIMESTAMP STATUS freeform" where UID would be a fairly unique but short (6-8 ASCII characters) ID such as MTAs generate, PHASE would be in the Linux .rc format (00-RECEIVED, 01-PARSED, ...) for sorting. This may be a dumb idea for various reasons, haven't thought carefully about it, but you can see how it would make it easy to see a message's progress with a simple line sort. "line sort" is not essential, but it should be easy for a tool to produce such output.
- It's rather important to log receipt, as a couple of recent threads on Mailman-Users show.
- Log data through the web is probably the single biggest thing we can do to comfort cPanel and Plesk users.
MailmanWiki: DEV/Improved Logging/0000 (last edited 2007-04-28 03:50:31 by stephen@xemacs)