#8 Rotating logs

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hello,

First of all, thanks again for the very useful grsync software.

While searching for the grsync ini file yesterday, I stumbled on the logs that have been piling up since I am using grsync. There were more than two GB of logs in the hidden grsync folder on my Ubuntu installation.

Grsync being a GUI application, we should not expect users to look for hidden folders in order to see/consult older the logs.

Moreover, what is more important in my eyes, I would suggest to implement some kind of rotating logs in order to avoid the logs of grsync eating up a lot of space on the harddisk.

Thanks in advance for taking these suggestions into account.

Cheers,

Francesco

[Piero Orsoni]

Hello,

Thanks for your suggestion.
I'm not sure it's a task which should be done by grsync itself. There are tools which are specifically designed for the task: most distributions have "logrotate" or other such tools.
Furthermore logs are off by default, only some more experienced users will enable them.
I don't think every program which creates logs should replicate the log rotating code, with the additional risk of every log following different naming and configuration rules. A lot of code duplication and incoherence.
Maybe the grsync package could drop a file somewhere, in order to make use of the standard tools offered by the distribution. The issue I see with this approach is that, as far as I know, those configuration files are system-wide; will they work on a user level?

Martjin could you chime in for the deb package and debian/ubuntu setup?

Thanks!

[Piero Orsoni]

I added a little note to the readme file about log rotation, as suggested by Martijn.

[Francesco Fumanti]

Thanks for looking into it.

You have a good point by considering that it might not be the task of grsync to rotate the logs.

But I doubt that a note in the Readme can make a substantial difference. (I don't expect the average user installing software through a GUI from a repository to read the Readme.)

I hope that Martijn will find a solution for the debian package.

Have a nice day.

Francesco

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hi Piero,

I might have an idea: What do you think about adding a additional option in the Preferences of grsync that says:

"Append logs".

When that option is enabled, we would have the current behaviour; when it is disabled, it would overwrite the last log of the corresponding rsync command.

This way, when a user looks into the Preferences and enables the logging option, he sees that the logs will not grow indefinetly if he does not enable append logs. Moreover, I would suggest to leave Append logs off by default; but I am not sure about this, because it changes the current behaviour.

Since Grsync is running on different platforms, I thought that it might be good telling you about this idea as it is a platform independent solution to the problem.

In any case, thanks again for this useful software.

Cheers,

Francesco

[Piero Orsoni]

Looks good to me, will look into it asap.
Many thanks for the suggestion(s)!

[Francesco Fumanti]

Thanks to you for being so responsive and forthcoming.

Could you please write a notice in this thread when you are done with the "Append" option? I might add the changes to my PPA in Ubuntu.

Cheers

[Piero Orsoni]

patch committed!

[Francesco Fumanti]

Thanks Piero for the patch. I will look in January into it, when I will have more time.

Enjoy the holidays.

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hi,

I just uploaded an updated version of grsync to my PPA for trusty, vivid, wily and xenial:
https://launchpad.net/~frafu/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

It now also has the new "Overwrite logs" option; however, I did not take the updated translations of revision 146 of trunk into my PPA.

Cheers