Proposed F19 Feature: systemd features

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 29.01.13 14:30, Bill Nottingham (notting at redhat.com) wrote:

> Jaroslav Reznik (jreznik at redhat.com) said: 
> > = Features/SystemdMessageCatalog =
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemdMessageCatalog
> > 
> > Feature owner(s): Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering dot net>
> > 
> > Logging is essential for finding and tracking down system problems. Just finding 
> > and tracking them down however is seldom enough to actually get them fixed. 
> > With Journal Message Catalogs we want to link helpful meta information 
> > directly to many log messages applications generate, keyed off an ID 
> > identifying the type of message. This localized meta information can help the 
> > user to fix the problem, refer him to additional documentation, or even inform 
> > him where to get further help. 
> 
> This is interesting, in that it's a feature that's occasionally requested
> by various users and administrators. However, this is rather limited in
> that only systemd stuff is using it now, and it's tied to the journal API.
> 
> Do we know 1) if anything else is going to start tagging messages in this
> way (the kernel, other programs, etc.) 

I know that at least gnome-session started to tag some of its messages
with a message ID.

This is a relatively new feature, we haven't really began to advertise
that this is now available too much. In fact, posting this as Fedora
feature is our first step to make this more broadly known, and maybe get
more people to use this.

> 2) if it's possible to set the
> MESSAGE_ID in some other structured way?

Well there is no other structured API in our basic stack I was aware of,
so no, you have to use the journal API for this.

That said, libvirt actually uses structured logging to the journal now,
but does not use our API for that, since they had some special
needs. The local protocol is currently not documented, but is considered
stable (I really should document it in the wiki, too), so they just
issue the log messages on their own.

At the moment systemd itself already generates quite a few messages
already that have MESSAGE_IDs attached and message catalog
entries. However, this is is far from complete, and we should improve
the catalog entries and add more message IDS.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.