Werk #15179: logwatch agent plugin: Always encode output in UTF-8

This werk is only incompatible if you monitor logfiles containing non-ASCII characters with the logwatch agent plugin.

As of this werk, the logwatch 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 logwatch 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 logwatch 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.

To the list of all Werks