Why not syslog?

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nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) wrote:
> This is not a flame; it's not even particularly related to mgetty.  Could
> someone tell me why authors of software invent their own logging scheme
> instead of using syslog?  Taylor UUCP does it, mgetty does it, modgetty
> does it.  Enough people do it that there must be some drawback to using
> syslog that I'm not aware of.

To quote policy.h-dist:
% /* Syslog
%  *
%  * If you want logging messages of type L_AUDIT, L_ERROR and L_FATAL
%  * to go to the "syslog", define this.
%  * mgetty will use the facility "LOG_DAEMON", and the priorities
%  * LOG_NOTICE, LOG_ERR and LOG_ALERT, respectively.
%  */
% /* #define SYSLOG */

It's in there, it's just not on by default. I assume that syslog isn't
widespread enough to be able to use it *instead* of other logging
facilities, but it is definitely useful to be able to put the
more important logging information into a systemwide log file.

Klaus
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