Bug#448823: tomcat5.5: syslog messages have extra timestamp

[Marcus Better]

> > The messages in question are those sent to stdout/err by Tomcat. They
> > init script tells jsvc to send those to the syslog.
>
> A better solution would be to send stdout and stderr to
> /var/log/tomcat5.5/catalina.{out,err}

The reasoning behind that setup is that Tomcat uses stdout/err for daemon 
startup and shutdown messages, and on Debian such messages are nearly always 
sent to daemon.log. So I would rather keep it this way.

The user can always change the init script to send those messages elsewhere.

> and ship with a log4j file that 
> sends tomcat logging to a file, say /var/log/tomcat5.5/tomcat.log,

The default setup splits the logs for each app to a separate file. Do you mean 
those should be merged into one log file only?

I have this on my relatively new install:

~$ ls /var/log/tomcat5.5/
admin.2007-10-25.log     catalina.2007-11-01.log      localhost.2007-10-31.log
admin.2007-10-26.log     host-manager.2007-10-25.log  localhost.2007-11-01.log
admin.2007-10-31.log     host-manager.2007-10-26.log  manager.2007-10-25.log
admin.2007-11-01.log     host-manager.2007-10-31.log  manager.2007-10-26.log
catalina.2007-10-25.log  host-manager.2007-11-01.log  manager.2007-10-31.log
catalina.2007-10-26.log  localhost.2007-10-25.log     manager.2007-11-01.log
catalina.2007-10-31.log  localhost.2007-10-26.log

I agree that something could be done about the rotation. The datestamps are 
just irritating since they interfere with tab completion. Can we just remove 
the datestamps, and have logrotate do the rotation? (Provided it doesn't 
require server restart, that would be bad.)

Marcus