[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#311300: ignores "syslog only" config parameter and writes to log files /var/log/samba/log.[sn]mbd anyway

[Tom Metro]

Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> ...Samba's startup code runs before the smb.conf is processed.  One 
> could argue that it is a bug, but I would argue it is also WONTFIX.  If 
> we delay logging until after smb.conf processing, we could not log 
> incorrect smb.conf statements.

I'd argue that it is a bug.

The traditional way to handle situations like this is to write conf file 
parsing errors and other early stage initialization errors to STDERR.

If it is felt that logging is still necessary at this stage (due to the 
poor, but common practice of dumping output from init scripts to 
/dev/null), it'd be better to log to syslog in opposition to the users 
wishes, than to log to the debug logs, in opposition to the users wishes.

At least with syslog, the system is bound to already have a process in 
place for managing and rotating the logs, where in contrast they might 
not have anything in place for the debug logs if they think they've 
disabled them.

  -Tom