F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

[Eric Smith]

On Jul 15, 2013 5:51 PM, "Lennart Poettering" <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 16.07.13 09:13, Dan Fruehauf (malkodan at gmail.com) wrote:
>
> > > 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.
> > >
> > And the reason for that being? I have no idea either, it's probably too
old
> > to be dug. Howver yes, I'd like these to be text based as well.
>
> Oh, the reasons are pretty well-known for those cases. For example
> wtmp/utmp is binary so that utmp works nicely as sparse file and the
> entries may be accessed using the UID number as seek index (multipled by
> the fixed entry size). So, it's about indexing, exactly as for journal
> files. The Unix guys back then chose binary when it made sense for their
> immediate technical requirements. And for us it's the exact same.

I don't believe that was the reason, since when utmp was invented, Unix had
16-bit UIDs and did not have sparse files.  On the other hand, I don't know
the actual reason.

Eric
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