The changed merged from http://bugs.python.org/issue16168 causes a regression in SysLogHandler behavior. The socktype of /dev/log is dependent on syslog configuration, and the fallback behavior (trying SOCK_DGRAM and then SOCK_STREAM if the former failed) was very useful.

A better fix for this would preserve the fallback behavior in cases where the caller has not specifically requested a socktype. I've attached a patch with one such approach.

I've attached an alternative patch. The default socktype stays as socket.SOCK_DGRAM, but you can specify socktype=None to get the SOCK_DGRAM falling back to SOCK_STREAM behaviour.

Can you confirm that this alternative approach works in your environment? (This patch is against the default branch.)

It doesn't fix it unless I change the configuration (and in some cases the code) for every SyslogHandler across all of our projects, plus every single library we use. Google around For "SysLogHandler /dev/log socktype" and then compare with "SysLogHandler /dev/log". You won't find many hits where people set socktype, because people knew that SyslogHandler just Did The Right Thing when presented with an AF_UNIX. That has been the behavior since the logging module was introduced in 2.3.

I'm just asking that you preserve the default behavior that has existed since python 2.3- that was the purpose of my patch. I'm not tied to how I implemented it (I mean, it is kind of ugly) but I believe preserving the behavior is important, and I also believe that it will break less code than what is currently there (because, after all, socktype was only introduced in 2.7, the SysLogHandler doesn't care if it's None, and subclasses couldn't have relied on it in the AF_UNIX case because the original fallback didn't update it)

Does that mean that if I just change the default back to socktype=None, that will be good enough?

On top of your patch? Yeah, I think so. (I wrote it the way I did so it could handle syslog configuration changes, but that's kind of an uncommon case).

Thanks!

Okay, I made the change to default socktype=None. Please try out the latest patch (ideally on all Python versions you can test with) to confirm it's OK. Then I can apply to 2.7/3.2/3.3/default. Thanks.

I've tested in our full dev setup, and it seems to work fine; I've also tested on my laptop, no problems there either.

Unfortunately, that's python 2.7.4 in both cases. I don't really have a python3 setup I can bump up to test.

New changeset 32a5de0e91d5 by Vinay Sajip in branch '2.7':
Issue #17795: Reverted backwards-incompatible change in SysLogHandler with Unix domain sockets.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/32a5de0e91d5

New changeset d03784713786 by Vinay Sajip in branch '3.3':
Issue #17795: Reverted backwards-incompatible change in SysLogHandler with Unix domain sockets.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/d03784713786

New changeset 9c0a677dbbc0 by Vinay Sajip in branch 'default':
Closes #17795: Reverted backwards-incompatible change in SysLogHandler with Unix domain sockets.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/9c0a677dbbc0