F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 16.07.13 00:55, Dan Fruehauf (malkodan at gmail.com) wrote:

> +1 - same here. You're far from being alone.
> 
> I'm still trying to get used to the new systemd in Fedora and still trying
> to think why I need it. Altogether for my day to day use I find it as added
> complexity with no real benefit cerca f15.
> 
> Unix/Linux for me is the simplicity of text files. If I lose the simplicity
> of text files I just wonder what is left for me? A bunch of vague files in
> a binary format I need complex  tools to decipher? Might as well just
> install win7 and utilize my gfx card.

Well, there are certain things on Unix that are text files and many
things that are not. Binary log files have a long tradition on Unix, for
example in wtmp and utmp. We have binary files in /etc, and everywhere
else.

journalctl is certainly not a "complex tool" to understand. Command
lines usually get shorter by using it rather than the equivalent for
/var/log/messages.

"cat /var/log/messages" becomes just "journalctl"

"tail -f /var/log/messages" becomes "journalctl -f"

"tail -n 100 /var/log/messages" becomes "journalctl -n 100"

"grep foo /var/log/messages" becomes journalctl | grep foo"

And the outputs of these files are the exact same text streams you are
used to. However, enhanced with a lot of niceties that make them more
user friendly. For example, you get colors based on the log level, or
there's a line drawn between reboots. You get the time zone corrected,
and you get unconditional PID data, you can filter very very easy, the
data is unfakable and so on.

Just think about this:

"journalctl -b" shows you output of the current boot only

"journalctl --since=today" shows you the output of today only

"journalctl -p notice" shows you only notice and error messages
(i.e. all the important stuff)

"journaclctl -u crond" shows you only the messages from cron.

... and so on.

Now try to think how hard it is to express queries the same way on
classic syslog. And how slow they become on larger database because they
aren't indexed.

journalctl makes a lot of things easier, much easier. If you say it is
complex or difficult to use I am pretty sure you never had a closer look
at it.

(Also, I am not sure what you mean by "vague". Please note that the file
format is fully documented:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/ also, we
commited to an API for them and more)

> Lets try to keep things simple. This is why we use Fedora. This is why I
> use Fedora.

We are certainly making things simpler by introducing nice query tools
like journalctl and by reducing the number of packages we install by
default, and by removing redundancy.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.