Re: The 🐑 Shepherd gets a service collection

[Adam Faiz <adam.faiz@disroot.org>]

On 3/16/23 22:14, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> The main limitation of mcron for such thing is that it’s entirely
> static: it reads a list of job specs upfront and then goes on to
> schedule them.  There’s no communication protocol to talk to it and
> add/remove jobs on the fly, which is what ‘at’ would need.
Would it be easier to add dynamic job spec support to mcron than adding a new command scheduler?

>> Regarding syslogd, I think a better approach is to tell the services to send their output to stdout and stderror,
>> so that logs don't depend on a separate logging service in the first place.
> 
> Yes, but:
> 
>    1. Some daemons include syslog support even today, sometimes optional,
>       sometimes mandatory.
> 
>    2. Syslog is a bit more structured than just stdout/stderr output:
>       there are facilities and levels, for instance—see syslog(3);
>       syslogd provides interesting filtering capabilities.
>
Thanks, it looks like syslog is still important for structured logs.

Are there issues of logs sent to syslog being lost even when the syslogd service is specified as a requirement of services that use it?
If not, I think it's not necessary to add a syslogd implementation to the shepherd.
  
>> Per-service logging is already implemented in the Shepherd, but could be streamlined to have a default logs directory:
>> https://skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-log.html#loggingchain
> 
> Interesting read, thanks!
> 
> Regarding the default logs directory, there’s /var/log already, or did
> you mean something else?
I do mean /var/log, I felt like #:log-file in make-forkexec-constructor could be improved.
Rather than always having to specify the absolute log file path, #:log-file could just be set as #t and would then default to /var/log/$canonical-name of the service.
  
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.