Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 21923
log format should be "combined", not "common"
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:30:09 EDT
Most web parsing programs prefer the additional "referer" information that the "combinded" log format provides. It would be nice to see the next release default to combined. Thanks, Joshua Jensen joshua@iwsp.com
Combined log format _is_ better, but switching, at least without changing the name, would probably break a lot of log analyzers especially if no clear warning was issued.
Admins who set up log analyzers pay attention to log formats, and so do most log analysis programs. Anyone that upgrades from 7.0 to 7.1 with an untouched httpd.conf file probably doesn't care about the log formats, and anyone who upgrades with a changed httpd.conf file will have to deal with httpd.conf.rpmsave issues anyway. A log name change would force the issue, yes, but it would do so only by requiring _everyone_ to reconfigure their log parsing program . Simply changing just the format type would allow everyone to benefit, and would force the issue only with admins that fail to use format-aware log parsing programs AND don't pay attention to httpd.conf.rpmsave upgrade issues. My 2 cents.
The default should be combined. People using log analyzers have ALREADY changed it to combined, people who aren't using log analyzers don't care, and won't notice. Dax Kelson Guru Labs
I'm going to defer this one for another release. I'd rather not force rpmsave issues for this minor change, and we're looking at more major changes after the next release.
Since we're setting up a session cache for the default, I'll go ahead and make this change.