F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Eric Smith]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> It's a matter of finding the right balance: i.e. what can be text files,
> and where we have to win more by making it binary. I am pretty sure this
> is a case where we win more by sticking to binary files. It's totally
> fine if you disagree on this, but I'd still like to ask you to think
> about whether your specific usecase and specific requirements are strong
> enough to (continue to) be the default for Fedora, instead of just being
> your local configuration of Fedora.
>
> I mean, you should never forget that on your own machines everything
> will stay as is: you will install syslog, and things will be exactly as
> before.

I have thought a lot about usecases, and it's exactly because I have
to maintain other people's systems that use the default installation,
and I routinely have to use more, less, cat, grep, vi, etc. on
/var/log/messages that I don't want to see it go away.  It's far
easier for me to tell someone a grep command on the phone than to also
have to tell them to run some other tool and pipe the input into grep,
or into a temp file that I can have them look at in an editor.
/var/log/messages is there, it works, and it is BETTER than a binary
format even if it doesn't contain as much information.

Eric