Logsend 1.0 is released and this IS a relief. Despite the fact that I always think of logsend in terms of “just a small app”, it took me more time than I ever thought to make it workable, and when I look back I wonder if there couldn’t be anything more useful (and less exhausting) to do with my life.

Started as just a shell script to send me e-mail “alerts” of what was happening in my network at home while I experiment with no matter what may be the web finding of the day, it soon evolved into a continuously demanding attention project; watching a log file while is rotated proved to be not such a trivial task, and doing it reliably using more than one backends - a pain. The first release I uploaded to Sourceforge (0.5) was finally something usable, but I soon realized it had some major flaws: there were time delays when the files weren’t watched and when anything could be appended to them - and then rotated causing the added lines to be lost, and the performance was poor, too many checks with “cmp” and “wc” were keeping the hard drive busy.

Initially, for version 1.0 was planned only the TAIL backend addition, but since there were many other things to be fixed, I started again and also rewrote from scratch the INOTIFY backend; I found out there was no way of making CACHE reliable, so I just dropped it. Later on I discovered that TAIL needed some changes too because - you guessed - it wasn’t reliable and the performance was poor (it looks like there are things in someone’s way impossible to get rid of until they are achieved).

Now that all the code is simplified to such extent that when I think of it I see only a white skeleton, I can say it worthed some attention, but the lesson is learned - I’ll never get too deep into something just because I need it and not because I really enjoy it, otherwise I’ll feel it is a burden. Like I felt about logsend - “the logsend curse”.