F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 11:38:14PM +0200, Mateusz Marzantowicz wrote:
> On 15.07.2013 23:06, Lennart Poettering 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. Lennart 
> 
> So maybe we (Fedora) should go with XML instead of binary or some
> dedicated RDMBS for storing system logs? I'm not against binary log
> format but try to understand why it's superior to text and also why
> something more sophisticated isn't used if we really need this
> additional meta data that could not be included in plain text?
With a binary format you can have an index of field -> offset,
hash->offset, etc., and then you can jump to this offset and read data
there. With text files, and with XML files, this is not possible, at
least not in any sane way. Efficiency would be much worse too.

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