Even production system logs will eventually grow to the point where they take up a significant amount of disk space, and this is even more of a problem with development systems that follow the preceding guidelines. One of the administrator's duties is to determine how much log data should be kept, and manage the mes appropriately.
All distributions, and Debian is no exception, provide by default a job or jobs that run periodically to close the current log mes, mark them with a cycle number, and open new, clean mes for logging. In Debian, this is provided by the logrotate package. While this package is primarily concerned with log files, itcan be used for any other mes that grow constantly and need to be cycled. Detailed documentation is provided with the package, but the basic idea is that each log file is checked and if itis over a certain size, it is closed. Then all cycles of the log me are renamed, and if necessary, those over a certain age or cycle number are deleted. A new log me is then created to continue logging.
You can configure how many cycles are kept, or even how old the cycles can be before they are deleted. The primary choice here is how long you wish to keep log entries. The defaults installed with each package reflect the experience of many administrators and are usually appropriate in most circumstances.
