F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 02:28:41PM -0600, Eric Smith wrote:
> > One process less in the system → faster bootup.
> 
> As has been pointed out, it could easily be the systemd journal
> process that writes to /var/log/messages, so there wouldn't
> necessarily be one fewer process.
> 
> > Logs not duplicated → less disk usage.
> 
> True. So keep /var/log/messages and make the binary journal optional.
Binary journal gives other features like:
- additional metadata (log level, selinux context, uid, gid,
  capability set (coming soon), cgroups, systemd unit)
- slicing and dicing of the data (reverse output, various formats,
  interleaving of journals from multiple machines, fast filtering
  by various properties)
- fast access to the data, so e.g. 'systemctl status unit'
  can show data for that unit. With text based /var/log/messages
  this would be just to slow. Also TAB-completion for filters.

So removing the binary journal has huge downsides. The need for
/var/log/messages filters down to wanting to use less or shell
built-ins to read the data, which is a valid usecase, but not
worth the overhead in 99% of cases.

Zbyszek
-- 
they are not broken. they are refucktored
                           -- alxchk