logtail is currently using Perl. While it's syntax got somehow cleared for sarge - it won't reach CPAN quality standards. logtail needs to be expanded to support file rotation and db storage. Current logtail relies on Perl 5.8 features.
The rewritten logtail uses C and thus has much better performance. It uses GNU extensions so might not be as portable, but will get added file rotation checks and optional db storage. It has long option parsing support as well as old invocation compatiblity. It adds an debug mode and is more strict about umask.
bzr pull http://debian.stro.at/bzr-test/logtail/ (not currently functional)
http://debian.stro.at/bzr-test/logtail/
TODO:
- insert small benchmark results
- support logfile rotation
- db storage
- test framework
items to discuss:
- return codes: The rewritten Perl logtail introduced ugly error return codes. They were not existant in the early C version. I'm not sure if we want to keep them or if we should get rid of them. Depends a bit if some projects uses them..
copytruncate causes old logtail a warning message to be printed on stdout - see #195935.
- The rewritten logtail only shows it in debug mode.