F21 Self Contained Change: Remote Journal Logging

Fri May 2 14:53:59 UTC 2014

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On 05/01/2014 10:40 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 12:07:25PM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote: Hi, 
> sorry for the late reply, I'm away on a workshop...
> 
>> So, this change went to fesco last week, but there were some 
>> questions/issues around it. Could change owners respond to:
>> 
>> 1) sgallagh wasn't sure this was a self contained change: see:
>> https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1250#comment:19
> 
> sgallagh wrote "I don't consider this to be a self-contained 
> change. If it goes into effect, we (FESCo) are basically stating
> that this a recommended way for users to gather journald logs in a
> central location"
> 
> I don't know where this conclusion comes from. This change is
> about adding some new software... When e.g. Ganesha is proposed as
> a Change, it doesn't that it is the recommended network filesystem
> implementation.
> 

It's kind of implicit in the Change proposal. When you submit a
Change, you are indicating that you want this to be something that
Fedora promotes (both from an engineering standpoint and a marketing one).

With something like Ganesha, in part because there are other network
filesystem implementations that are well-known, it's fairly easily
understood that this is an additive change.

However, with remote journal logging, there currently exists no
mechanism for this (except for dumping syslog, which loses all of the
enhanced capabilities of journald)

> I am open to adding some text making it explicit that this is a
> new technology and probably only suitable for some use cases.
> 

That would make this much more palatable, thank you.

> He also writes "particularly since it appears to have been
> developed without the input of the journald creators". The code in
> question has been reviewed on the systemd mailing list, and
> discussed internally. Also, although I didn't have anything to do
> with initial journald creation, I have been one the people handling
> bugs and adding features to it over the last two years.

This was an impression I got from the discussion thread up to that
point. I didn't get a sense that the core journald developers were in
agreement with this as the approach (and as noted above, it appeared
that this was being pushed as the One True Way to do this).

> 
>> 2) FESCo in general wondered if we advertised this as a change
>> if people would see it as the recommended/default way to handle
>> remote system logs. Is it planned to be that, or is it just a
>> 'here's a preview of how we hope to do this down the road'?
> The latter. Not that I think it will not work, but making it the 
> default/recommended thing when it's not even written yet seems 
> premature.
> 

Right, as noted above we should be clear about this when we talk about it.

>> 3) There were general concerns around the protocol/setup... but I
>> think those were raised before in this thread. Is there any
>> revisiting of the protocol/etc planned? Or things are pretty set
>> at this point?
> This was proposed as a Change exactly for the purpose of gathering 
> feedback, even of the fargoing kind like that. There's lot of
> merit in the proposed protocol modifications, but it's a fairly big
> modification, and I haven't had time to properly think about it.
> 

So the obvious question here is whether we should accept this as a
Change now. Given that you are contemplating a significant protocol
modification, would it make more sense to defer this Change until F22?
(that doesn't mean you can't have the code in Fedora, just that we
won't market it and push people towards testing it in F21).