The gnome-system-log log-viewing utility does not recognise logfiles generated with metalog and declares that such a file is "not a log". There's no indication in the help doc that gnome-system-log depends on syslog format log files, although the man page for the tool pretty much seems to assume that everyone is using syslog. The Gnome developers need to be aware that not everyone uses syslog or it's workalike logger descendants. Either the help doc and the man page should be updated to clearly indicate that log file formats other than those generated with syslog won't work with the tool, or gnome-utils should depend on syslog-ng in Gentoo, or best of all, gnome-system-log should be enhanced to work with alternative log file formats.
I don't run metalog, but anybody I have asked says gnome-system-log can its logs fine. Perhaps you were running the program as a user who didn't have permissions to read the logs. Did you try reading more then one log? Can you try running as a user with the correct permissions? Unless somebody can provide a logfile generated by metalog that isn't readable by gnome-system-log, there isn't much I can do here.
I did a deep re-emerge last night of about 80 odd packages (including substantial parts of gnome) after updating my USE list and it looks as if the problem is now resolved. I should note, however, that the message I was getting was "not a log", whereas if there's a permissions error, the message is "could not be opened". I believe I took permissions into account when I did my tests and posted here, although it's been a while. I was, at that time, able to open and parse a /var/log/messages file from another box which uses syslogd, and I note that the permissions on that file were read-restricted to root:root, so I believe I tested it as root before filing this bug. Anyway, thanks for responding on this. It looks like all is well.
