Re: svlogd localtime option

[Gerrit Pape <pape@smarden.org>]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 12:53:15PM -0700, Jared Rhine wrote:
> In the spirit of making svlogd output useful to humans, svlogd has the
> -tt switch to output in human-readable UTC.  Would there be resistance
> to having it be really useful by supporting a -ttt which uses
> localtime?  We're really talking about having using localtime instead
> of gmtime in one line in fmt_ptime.c, though option processing and
> such would need to change.
> 
> I appreciate that UTC-based servers are useful in a global setting,
> but it's a hindrance to good systems administration in many contexts.
> And there's always the internal politics, where coworkers complain.

Using TAI or UTC has the great advantage that logs are sortable after
merging, this is not guaranteed when using localtime.

I think it's better to let the pager used to display logs do such jobs.
I've been thinking about a "svlogp" program (svlog processor, or pager)
for some time, which should be able to select log message by pattern or
time, to merge logs from multiple log directories, and maybe to
transform timestamps and more.

There have been feature requests for a tai64nlocal alike program.

> It may be the case that there's already an (undocumented?) -ttt
> option, if I'm reading svlogd.c right.  It looks like that option
> truncates the sub-second portion.

Yes, but please don't use it, it's undocumented...

Regards, Gerrit.