[rsyslog] omfile redesign / $OutChannel will go away!

[Rainer Gerhards]

Hi all,

I have begun to redesign the pretty old omfile output plugin. Large parts of
this work are covered by a sponsorship.

I will probably post a number of questions during the redesign process.
Please speak up if you have any opinion on them. Once I have finished the new
design, it is not likely to change during the next three to five years. For
the same reason, please speak up now if you are desperately missing something
in omfile.

A concrete question I have is on the $OutChannel directive[1]. It is
scheduled for replacement for quite a while, and now may be the time that it
finally goes away. If you use $OutChannel, please let me know why.

The most prominent use case is to size-limit files. $OutChannel provides the
ability to execute a command when a certain file size is reached. The command
may then rotate the file. After command execution, omfile checks the file
size again. If it still is above the configured limit, this file will be
disabled (no longer be written to until restart).

If you use this for size-limiting, please let me know how you do it. Please
also let me know if you would like to see things handled differently.

Looking forward to your feedback.

Thanks,
Rainer


[1] http://www.rsyslog.com/doc-rsyslog_conf_output.html