Bug#399930: logrotation race condition with exim writing to logs

[Marc Haber]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2006 at 11:38:30PM +1100, CaT wrote:
> Testing as to wether or not the logfile exists does not test wether
> exim is functioning. It's the logrotation that creates the logfile 
> and so a test for its presence is a test for logrotation and nothing
> more. As such you need to have your monitoring system test further in
> order to report the right thing.

There is no such "your" monitoring system. This package is installed
on thousands of systems, and some of them are doing monitoring, which
you classify as "broken", because they have been relying on the log
file existing and have not special cased the case where the log file
does not exist.

I am not going to break these setups without thinking about it.

[rest of sermon deleted]

> In short there's nothing really gained by precreating the logfile except
> a small chance for pain.

I happen to disagree.

Greetings
Marc

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