F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Miroslav Suchý]

On 07/15/2013 01:23 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> But anyway, I'd still like to hear the technical reasoning for the
> opinion you expressed.

Because you are able to read txt file with *anything*. But you are not 
always able to read binary files. Because journalctl is not available.

Example from real life:
Sometimes it happen to me, that I'm fixing totally borked computer. And 
I have available only what is in memory - because HDD with /usr crashed, 
but machine is still running (and /var is readable) and with vt open. 
(BTW - coincidently it happened to me just one month ago).
If I want to read last messages, I could not start journactl, but I can 
read /var/log/messages with bash builtins.

And since I'm not always choosing which machine I'm going to fixing, I 
would prefer that /var/log/messages is present as text file as default.

If somebody explicitly want to remove rsyslog and live only with 
journalctl, then let it be. And I do not care about other logs, they can 
be in binary forms, if you want. But I want to have /var/log/messages 
available in pure text form.

-- 
Miroslav Suchy
Red Hat, Software Engineer