Trac log too big, but no useful error

[edward.b.matheson@…]

So I have discovered this whilst using a plugin, but I believe it's an issue that will need to be dealt with in Trac core.

• email2trac uses a mail alias pipe to open run its script. This gets the trac env by using:

     env = Environment(settings['project'], create=0)
          except IOError, detail:
              logger.error("Trac project does not exists: %s" %settings['project'])
              sys.exit(0)
  

  This has been dying with the error posted, but nothing more useful. After much research and testing I found that trac was dying because it couldn't open the error log because it was too big. I found this using strace. It's rather a catch-22 .. but perhaps if it dies .. kick out an error on STDERR so that the issue can be more readily found.

[Remy Blank]

There are at least two solutions to this issue:

• Log to syslog, and let your logger deal with it.
• Use a program like logrotate to avoid the log getting too big.

If anything, then Python's logging framework should be improved, as that's what Trac is using.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to rblank:

… If anything, then Python's logging framework should be improved, as that's what Trac is using.

Well, it can already do more than what we're currently asking it to do ;-) For example, setting limits on log size and rotation could already be supported (​RotatingFileHandler).

[Christian Boos]

I just remembered there's even #6226, which has a patch implementing this. Some testing and feedback would be welcome there.