What are reasonable blockers for making journald the default logger in F19?

Matthew Miller mattdm at fedoraproject.org
Wed Oct 17 14:44:53 UTC 2012


With the stipulation that rsyslog would still be available to provide a
traditional syslog-style text logs, what are reasonable hard requirements
for making systemd the main logging system installed by default? (Or, an
alternate softer implementation: rsyslogd would be installed by default but
would not be in 'core'.)

These are the things I think are critical:

1. Time based rotation policies (implementation landing now.)
2. Mechanism for separation of authpriv data 
3. Disk-based storage on by default (ie /var/log/journal exists)
4. Traditional syslog still easily available via rsyslogd
5. Journal format documented
6. Strong QA exploring corner cases and data corruption (procedure tbd)
7. Clear, simple, and Fedora-centric disaster recovery documentation

Less critical but important:

a. Use wheel group in addition to adm -- work with the way Fedora/RHEL 
   currently do things
b. All utilities should always work sensibly with grep (this is not the
   case on F18 right now)
c. /var/log/messages written with a (syslog-formatted?) note pointing 
   to journalctl (maybe even showing the new time-based filtering?)

And, in order for the implementation to really be a *win* for Fedora, it
would be great if we could coordinate:

- integration with every log analysis tool tool we ship (for some tools,
  a crude implementation may just be dumping in the output of journalctl,
  using a temp file as worst case)

- integration with every monitoring system where it make sense

- bonus points: make these integrations benefit from systemd's fancy
  features.

Are these reasonable? Are there other important things I'm missing?

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>


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