syslog.Dial and syslog.New take a syslog.Priority as an argument and stores it in a field named priority. This field is used exactly twice:

• as a syslog facility in writeAndRetry
• as the syslog priority in Writer.Write

For examples of someone confused by this in the wild, check out logrus_syslog or golang-samples, which thinks that creating a syslog writer with a severity instead of a facility will do something meaningful:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log/syslog"
)

func test(p syslog.Priority, msg string) {
    w, e := syslog.New(p, msg)
    if e != nil {
        fmt.Println("Error opening syslog", e)
    } else {
        w.Debug("hello, world")
    }
}

func main() {
    test(syslog.LOG_ERR, "ALEX")
    test(syslog.LOG_INFO, "BEN")
    test(syslog.LOG_DAEMON, "CAROLE")
    test(syslog.LOG_USER, "DOUG")
}

<7>1 2016-05-18T10:50:43.326575-07:00 ubuntu-16 ALEX 2517 - -  hello, world
<7>1 2016-05-18T10:50:43.327090-07:00 ubuntu-16 BEN 2517 - -  hello, world
<31>1 2016-05-18T10:50:43.327409-07:00 ubuntu-16 CAROLE 2517 - -  hello, world
<15>1 2016-05-18T10:50:43.327707-07:00 ubuntu-16 DOUG 2517 - -  hello, world

It would be great if facility was a different type from priority, but barring that it would be wonderful to update the documentation here. In particular, I would love to see syslog.New and syslog.Dial take a variable named facility and explain the difference, with an example usage.

I'm happy to do it if such a change could be merged. I see that the package is "frozen" -- will it still accept doc fixes?