HEADS UP: The Joys of Logging, or subtle behaviour change of logging in the daemons in 4.15

[Ralph Boehme]

Hi folks!

The release of 4.15 is scheduled for next week, but we're currently 
struggling with a subtle change in the logging behaviour of our server 
processes (smbd, winbindd, nmbd and samba that is).

This is a subtle side effect of the great work done by Andreas 
consolidating the commandline option parsing of all tools and daemons. 
It has been brought to out attention by Björn Jacke here:

https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14803


In eg smbd there are two subtle changes comparing 4.14 and 4.15.

4.14 behaviour:

1) When starting eg smbd in daemon mode, initial parsing of smb.conf by 
lp_load_() goes to a logfile.

2) When starting in interactive mode with -1, logging goes to stdout.


4.15 behaviour:

1) Logging goes to stderr instead of a file

2) Logging goes to stderr instead of stdout

Note that 1) affects all daemon processes while 2) only affects smbd and 
nmbd.


The following MR addresses all of the above

https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/merge_requests/2150


Behaviour of 1) is restored to what we had in 4.14.


2) is addressed by opting for stderr instead of stdout, ie

- in 4.14 all daemons were logging to stdout

- in the previous 4.15rc's:

   - smbd and nmbd were logging to stderr

   - winbind and samba were logging to stdout

- with MR 2150 all daemons log to stderr when started with -i


Not that all of this really matters, in the end it's just logging. But 
given the vast amount of tooling around logging these ways, we're 
worried that the subtle changes in 2) may be an issue.

1) isn't really problematic, but what shall we do with 2) ? Go for 
stderr as implemented in the MR or rollback to logging to stdout as we 
did in 4.14?

I'd vote for stderr, what do others think ?

Please note that the 4.15 release is handing in limbo until this issue 
is resolved one way or another. :)

Thanks!
-slow

-- 
Ralph Boehme, Samba Team                 https://samba.org/
SerNet Samba Team       https://www.sernet.de/en/team-samba
Samba Development and Support, SerNet Professional Services

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