[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#504219: Samba artificially depends on logrotate.

[David Wilson]

Package: samba
Version: 2:3.2.3-3

Hi there,

About once a year I get bitten by this: Samba has an artificial
dependency on logrotate being installed, which has the effect of
unnecessarily pulling it in as part of any apt-get I may run (which
admittedly I'm not reading the output of carefully enough). Although I
can understand the convenience this dependency provides, it runs
directly counter to how I go about log management.

Usually I install Samba then come back a week later to find all but
the last 7 days of /var/log have been destroyed.

I can understand the benefit of log rotation, however it is not the
only way of doing things. For example, the only problem with
infinitely growing logs is that they will eventually DoS the root or
/var filesystem. Simply monitoring free disk space on this filesystem,
which I must do anyway, solves this problem. Additionally, I see the
systematic destruction of log data a bigger security issue than the
possibility of a full root filesystem, although this is more of an
issue with logrotate itself than the Samba package.

Thankfully logrotate is optional and can simply be deinstalled
system-wide, unless I install one of the few packages like Samba that
insist on it being there, for seemingly no good reason at all. Samba's
functionality /does not depend/ on log rotation whatsoever, any more
than it depends on, say, non-POSIX locale data being installed. It
works fine without, and some (such as myself) might say even better
without.



David.