tree 15d53ccc01aae843ad174b80a32b84322a7debe1
parent 48d425e7c6615ac28d7de820e0a02d49bf726176
author Alan Jenkins <alan.christopher.jenkins@gmail.com> 1493917282 +0100
committer James Carter <jwcart2@tycho.nsa.gov> 1494005238 -0400

policycoreutils: fixfiles: deprecate -l option

...and write log messages to standard output.

Some versions of fixfiles in 2004 created a logfile by default.
Apparently they also used `tee` to log to standard output at the same time.
We're also told that the logfile was implemented because there was too
much output generated for use on a tty, and it scrolled out of reach.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=131707

In the current version, none of these original reasons for `-l` remain.

The logfile is not created by default.  If no log file is specified,
messages are written to stdin [sic]... if and only stdin is a tty.  If
stdin is not a tty, the log defaults to /dev/null.

When a user runs fixfiles on a tty and finds there is too much output, she
is likely to try redirecting standard output and/or standard error using
the shell.  She will find this doesn't help, because fixfiles is writing
the verbose log messages to standard input.

I tried to fix the problem non-intrusively, by changing the default log
file to `/dev/stdout`.  Sadly, this breaks down where you have
`echo >>$LOGFILE "Log message"` inside a specific function, which is run
with output redirected in order to "return" a string value (captured
into a variable).  exclude_dirs_from_relabelling() was such a function.

I was trying to abstract over writing to both normal files and stdout, but
my abstraction "leaks" in a non-obvious way.

There is a simple solution.  We can write the log messages to standard
output.  When we are passed `-l` by a legacy script, we can redirect
standard output to the logfile.

This removes any distinctions between the logfile and "non-log" messages.
Some calls to restorecon were missing redirections to the log file.
"Cleaning out /tmp" was written to the log file, but "Cleaning out labels
on /tmp" was not.  There were no comments to explain these distinctions.