----- Original message -----
On Wed, 28 Mar 2012, Rainer Gerhards wrote:
You don't know what you are going to break and you restrict yourself to the limitations of the current interface. It is not that I am against it, just if we want to improve it it might be best to redo it entirely.
I am strongly against changing the existing interface. This will break so many things that nobody will use it...
I agree that we need to not break any existing applications. What I am hoping for is that we can extend the interface in a way that's fully backwards compatible.
In this case, /dev/log is write-only for existing applications. They will never try to read anything from it.
So I was thinking that if the syslog daemon writes one string to each thing that connects to it, existing software will never read this string and everything will work as-is, new software could read the string and adjust it's behavior accordingly.
/dev/log is currently a SOCK_DGRAM socket, no need to connect, and no need to accept, only sendto and recvfrom.
Earlier, it used to be SOCK_STREAM, but that was 10 years ago.