[systemd-devel] Q: non-ASCII in syslog

[Ulrich Windl]

Hi!

Having written an RFC 3164 compatible syslog daemon, I noticed that systemd
created syslog messages with non-ASCII characters.
The problem is that a remote syslogd can hardly guess the correct character
set (I'm using rsyslog to forward local messages to a remote server).

Example of such message:
systemd-tmpfiles[3311]: [/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/svnserve.conf:1] Line references
path below legacy directory /var/run/, updating /var/run/svnserve →
/run/svnserve; please update the tmpfiles.d/ drop-in file accordingly.

(The arrow is encoded as three bytes (\xe2\x86\x92))

RFC 5425 syslog messages require the use of a BOM (%xEF.BB.BF) at the
beginning of a message if the message used UTF-8:

      MSG             = MSG-ANY / MSG-UTF8
      MSG-ANY         = *OCTET ; not starting with BOM
      MSG-UTF8        = BOM UTF-8-STRING
      BOM             = %xEF.BB.BF

Wouldn't it make sense to add such a BOM for RFC 3164 syslog messages also if
non-ASCII (i.e.: UTF-8) encoded characters are used?

systemd in use is systemd-228-157.38.4 of SLES12 SP5...

Regards,
Ulrich