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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 17.10.12 10:44, Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> 2. Mechanism for separation of authpriv data 

Humm, so, I have my doubts that this really is desirable...

"because syslog did it this way too" doesn't sound like a really good
reason for this. I have my doubts that it really that much more
desirable to have this split off. If we really split this off (which
technically is easy to do), and nobody but root gets access to it, this
means that it will be *really* hard to see this stuff, and since it's
not that much data people will very likely never explicitly check for
it. I for one really would like to see these messages if I run
"journalctl" as user "lennart", who is in "wheel". I should get to see
these messages. But while I can see all other messages I wouldn't be
able to see authpriv, and there'd be no easy way to make them visible to
myself...

Moreover, much of the information logged to authpriv is actually
available in utmp/wtmp afaics, so the I do wonder why have this at
all...

So I am not convinced this is really that nice a feature. Effectively
this will have the effect that authpriv messages will end up being
invisible to admins -- and the data is too precious to hide it away like
this.

If we design the behaviour of these things we really need to focus on
getting the interesting data to the admin, and not raise pointless
stumbling blocks everywhere. And "syslog always did it that way" is a
really bad reason on its own...

(I mean, maybe have this as an optional gimmick for the folks who
understand the split and know where to look makes sense, but i don't
think that this feature is really so superduper totally and utterly
necessary as a default, as you suggest...)

> b. All utilities should always work sensibly with grep (this is not the
>    case on F18 right now)

Hmm? How so? Bug?

> c. /var/log/messages written with a (syslog-formatted?) note pointing 
>    to journalctl (maybe even showing the new time-based filtering?)

I'd much prefer adding /var/log/README instead, in order not to confuse
tools which assume a properly formatted log file in /var/log/messages.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.