F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Thu Jul 18 12:06:03 UTC 2013


On Wed, 17.07.13 22:08, Ding Yi Chen (dchen at redhat.com) wrote:

> > Well, this won't "break" systems as the change is only for new
> > installations. Existing systems will stay exactly as they are, rsyslog
> > stays installed, and will work as always.
> 
> 1. What if they update the system like this:
>    Backed up user data/script -> Fresh install -> Restore user data/script
>    For that, it won't work.

In such a case, you already need to manually reinstall all packages you
need beyond the default set after the reinstallation. The fewest
people probably stick to exactly the set of packages we install by
default for their systems. rsyslog is now one more of those packages you
need to reinstall after your system is back up.

> 2. Like other already point out, Windows/Fedora dual boot.
>    You can see /var/log/messages from Windows, but how can you get
>    journalctl output in Windows?

Well, as pointed out before, "journalctl" on Windows helps little if you
cannot access the Linux partitions in the first place, because they are
ext4 or btrfs.

> > > Please update your knowledge, see:
> > > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=428097
> > > 
> > > They have /var/log/messages, yes, it might be different with ours.
> > > But yes, they have that.
> > 
> > So, they store different stuff in it. The interesting stuff is mostly in
> > daemon.log on Debian. So with your suggested program you'd miss out all
> > the interesting bit son Debian. This stuff is certainly not standardized
> > on Unix systems...
> 
> a) If debian output the thing I want in /var/log/messages anyway, why should I care
>    whether other daemon output in other files?

Well, most likely it won't include the interesting bits, because they
are in daemon.log.

I mean, you claim that all distros have /var/log/messages and that
that's where the interesting stuff goes. And that is simply not true. No
ifs, it's just simply not true.

> b) If my environment only contains RHEL and Fedora, why should I care how Debian, Arch and Ubuntu
>    handle their logs?

Well, "journalctl" has been available for some time already on Fedora,
and will be in RHEL7 too, so you shouldn't be too concerned there.

> > > Innovation should not be the cost of reliability and portability.
> > 
> > This change touches neither. /var/log/messages already isn't standard in
> > whether it exists at all, and what it contains, so we certainly don't
> > make "portability" worse...
> 
> Something is not standard does not mean nobody using it.

No it doesn't. Every package in the Fedora archive is used by somebody,
but that doesn't mean we install *all* packages always. We try to
install a default set that tries neither to be minimal, nor to include
everything possible. Something that one can work with and that has
little redundancy.

> Especially it is there quite a long time.
> Remove it simply break their expectation and scripts.
> For that, you do make the portability worse.

No, not true by any definition of the word "portability".

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.


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