Auto-rotate Rails log files

I've been searching for a way to make my rails apps rotate their log files automatically, the way apache does it. In my case, I get logs like this;

• access_log.20080407
• error_log.20080407

i.e. a log file per day, with the date as the suffix of the filename.
When a new day rolls around, a new file is started. Simple.
Hunting around on the web, most people seem to be writing a /etc/logrotate.conf file to achieve something like this. This has a couple of problems;

• After switching to a new log file, all your mongrel/fastcgi processes need to be restarted. Otherwise, you get a segfault when they try to log to a file that's not there anymore.
• The /etc/logrotate.conf file is yet another file whose deployment needs to be managed (potentially along with a cron entry to kick off logrotate at the appropriate time).

So, I kept digging and eventually found this post
So, Rails can be told to log to a pipe, just like apache. I'm not familiar with cronolog, so this is what I ended up putting in my config/environments/production.rb file;

config.active_record.colorize_logging = false

log_pipe = IO.popen("/usr/sbin/rotatelogs #{RAILS_ROOT}/log/production_log.%Y%m%d 86400", 'a')

config.logger = Logger.new(log_pipe)

[the second entry is supposed to be a single line from 'log_pipe = ' to ')' ]

1. Turn off colorized logs, because they irritate me.
2. Open a pipe to rotatelogs (I use 'a' for 'append', instead of 'w' for 'write', but it doesn't seem to make any difference on my system - the file is appended to when I restart rails, whichever I choose).
3. Point the rails logger to the pipe.

This seems to do exactly what I want, with minimal mucking about.