F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Marc Deop i Argemí]

On Monday 15 July 2013 17:55:34 Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 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.
>

Some may say that you are making things harder by introducing tools (thus new things to learn) that are not really needed on a day to day basis (which is, in fact, what Dan wrote).

However, I don't think we are discussing here whether we keep systemd or not rather than syslog, are we?

;-)

Regards,

Marc Deop