ID: 15179
Title: <tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin: Always encode output in UTF-8
Component: Checks & agents
Level: 1
Class: Bug fix
Version: 2.2.0i1
This werk is only incompatible if you monitor logfiles containing non-ASCII characters
with the
<tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin.
As of this werk, the <tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin always encodes its ouput
in UTF-8. Before, the
encoding depended on the system settings.
This werk is marked as incompatible because it can have an unexpected side effect: On some
systems,
users might now have to explicitly configure the encoding of the monitored log files. The
reason for
this is that if not explicitly configured, the <tt>logwatch</tt> plugin tries
to guess the encoding.
If the wrong encoding is guessed, log files are decoded incorrectly, however, before this
werk, this
error might have cancelled out due to <tt>logwatch</tt> using the same
encoding both for decoding
logfiles and encoding its output.
Since the latter is now always done using UTF-8, this cancellation will not happen
anymore. If you
are affected by this, you will either see the replacement character `�` appearing in your
log
messages or your log messages will contain random non-ASCII characters which do not make
sense.
As a positive side effect, correcting this issue enables the matching of patterns
containing non-
ASCII characters. Before, using the wrong encoding to decode the logfiles prevented this,
effectively leading to overlooked messages.
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