WL#233: Refuse start-up if no write perm to err log

Entered by Tom on behalf of Monty.

Idea originating from a student of Kaj's at May 01 UK class:

From: Michael Widenius 
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 04:00:18 +0300 (EEST)
To: Timothy Smith 
Cc: ksa@polycon.fi, dev@mysql.com, MySQL@polycon.fi
Subject: Re: Q: Second set of questions from the first UK MySQL course
 
>>>> 15. Follow up to the problem of the error log pointing to a place
>>>> where mysqld lacks write access: Could mysqld under such
>>>> circumstances write to an operating system dependent log?
>>>> Or would that introduce OS dependent code that should be
>>>> avoided at all costs?
>>> 
>>> Permission problems are thoroughly discussed in the manual.
> 
> Timothy> Again, the question isn't addressed.  Why not have mysqld use
> Timothy> syslog(3) to complain to the console (or whatever) in the case
> Timothy> that it can't open the error log?  That would be a good feature,
> Timothy> and I can't think of a reason not to do it.
> 
> This is something that is trivial to check at startup. Why not just
> refuse to start MySQL if we can't write to the log?
> (Tim, something for you to add to safe_mysqld...)

[ Note added 2011-08-05 by Peter Gulutzan ]

For example, after
mysqld --log-error=/etc/warning.txt
if the user has permission then messages go to /etc/warning.txt,
but otherwise messages to to stderr as if --log-error wasn't passed.
See the email from Guilhem Bichot in this email thread:
http://myforums.oracle.com/jive3/thread.jspa?threadID=830207&tstart=0