devedged: bound + rotate daemon logs out of the box (devedged.err.log grew to ~1.4 GB from a repeating reconcile error)

[daniel-garcia]

What happened

On a dev machine, ~/.devedge/logs/devedged.err.log had grown to ~1.4 GB. It was being appended
several times a minute by the same line from the reconcile loop:

{"level":"ERROR","msg":"hosts sync failed","err":"open /etc/hosts: permission denied"}

i.e. an unprivileged devedged retries /etc/hosts sync every ~15s forever, writing an ERROR each
tick. A single persistent condition silently filled >1 GB of disk. (Also observed: a stale root-owned
devedged lingering for weeks, compounding the growth.)

Ask

Ship sane log hygiene by default — a dev tool should never let its own log fill the disk:

1. Bound + rotate ~/.devedge/logs/devedged.{err,out}.log out of the box — e.g. lumberjack-style
   MaxSize (say 10–50 MB), MaxBackups, MaxAge, Compress. No opt-in required.
2. Rate-limit / dedupe repeating reconcile errors — a steady-state failure (permission denied, no
   privilege, unreachable upstream) should log once then back off / collapse ("last error repeated
   N times"), not once per tick.
3. Optional: surface the steady-state error via de status/de doctor instead of only the log, so a
   broken-but-running daemon is visible without tailing a growing file.

Environment

• macOS, de/devedged dev build.
• Repro: start devedged unprivileged (can't write /etc/hosts) and leave it running — the err log
  grows unbounded from the repeating reconcile error.

Impact

Silent disk fill on developer machines; the signal (one real problem) is buried in millions of
identical lines.