F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek at in.waw.pl
Mon Jul 15 21:08:28 UTC 2013


On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 02:53:06PM -0600, Eric Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> <zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> > So removing the binary journal has huge downsides.
> 
> I don't dispute that removing it would have a downside.  I might
> dispute that the downside is "huge", but for now I'll let that pass.
This means that you haven't really used journalctl. It *is* much
nicer. Try it, and you'll stop wanting to go back to 'less /var/log/messages'
and 'tail -f /var/log/*'.

> > 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.
> 
> But it's what people actually use in 99.9% of cases.  99.9% of the
> time I don't need the extra information in the binary journal.  Making
> /var/log/messages unavailable by default has a huge down side.
In one of the messages earlier in the thread (Message-ID:
<20130715155534.GC4989 at tango.0pointer.de>) Lennart posted a list of
"translations" to get the same output from journalctl... I think
most use cases were covered there. I'll add one more:

 "dmesg" -> "journalctl -k", except that the output is colored and
 doesn't wrap around.

Sure, you can't use 'for ... read' to read the journal, but as it
was already pointed out, you're more likely to do that on a server,
where installing rsyslog can be one of the customizations if you
think you'll need it.

> If we go to having only binary logs by default, maybe we should also
> go to having only binary configuration files by default.
[snip non-technical part]

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


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