“You probably don’t visit /var/log every day, or take care to ensure its contents – program log files – are safe. Most people see log files as a record of events: something that has to do with the past rather than something with an impact on the present or the future. In reality, effective log file management is critical for high system availability.”
A program/deamon that has access rights to /var/log must be running suid-root,feel free to correct me.While this article may be a benefit to newbie sys-admins i don’t think it’s helpfull for the average desktop.For the average desktop it’s perhaps better the less deamons,services are running the greater the overall system security benefits from it.
Unless the workstation is guarded by security mechanisms like,AppArmor,SELinux and the like ofcourse,but even than.The risk outweights the benefit in my opinion on the desktop.
Actually, logrotate is set up to be run by cron. The cron daemon runs the cronjobs as root (well, aside from user cron jobs). On most systems, cron or a cron equivalent is already running anyway.
Sure, logrotate could be malicious, but any responsible sysadmin would glance at the code beforehand and check out the credibility of the programming before allowing it to roam the system as root.
To my memory, metalog (an alternative to syslogd and syslog-ng) can rotate its own logs by itself. Of course, it only covers the system log, but I believe that is enough for desktop users. These users are rarely running services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix/Qmail/Sendmail, etc.