Apologies for crossposting

Heya,

The Analytics Team is planning to deploy "tab as field delimiter" to replace the current space as fielddelimiter on the varnish/squid/nginx servers. We would like to do this on February 1st. The reason for this change is that we need to have a consistent number of fields in each webrequest log line. Right now, some fields contain spaces and that require a lot of post-processing cleanup and slows down the generation of reports. 

What is affected and maintained by Analytics

* udp-filter already has support for the tab character

* webstatscollector: we compiled a new version of filter to add support for the tab character

* wikistats: we will fix the scripts on an ongoing basis.

* udp2log: we have a patch ready for inserting sequence numbers separated by tab.

In particular, I would like to have feedback to three questions:

1) Are there important reasons not to use tab as field delimiter?

2) Are there important pieces of logging that expect a space instead of a tab and that need to be fixed and that I did not mention in this email?

3) Is February 1st a good date to deploy this change? (Assuming that all preps are finished)

Best,

Diederik