On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 7:06 AM, Lennart Poettering <mzerqung@0pointer.de> wrote:

On Mon, 15.07.13 14:53, Eric Smith (brouhaha@fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> > The need for
> > /var/log/messages filters down to wanting to use less or shell
> > built-ins to read the data, which is a valid usecase, but not
> > worth the overhead in 99% of cases.
>
> But it's what people actually use in 99.9% of cases. 99.9% of the
> time I don't need the extra information in the binary journal. Making
> /var/log/messages unavailable by default has a huge down side.
>
> If we go to having only binary logs by default, maybe we should also
> go to having only binary configuration files by default. It's
> basically the same arguments: there's more information available; it's
> easier for software to parse; it can be made more reliable; special
> tools are OK and people don't really need to open it in a text editor.
> We've seen how well that works on Windows. Blech.

Nobody is proposing this. Slippery slope arguments seldom are
particularly convincing...

Slippery slope arguments is what will make Fedora stop being Linux and become a bunch of utilities to parse some binary format files on top of a Linux kernel.

And it's easy to turn this around: by following your logic we really
should get rid of ELF binaries and instead write everything in some
scripting language instead, since ELF binaries are, well, binary...

That's pretty silly. But as much as I'm opposed to journalctl, I would have been opposed to changing anything else which is Bash based to something that's ELF, unless there is a good argument for that (performance... or?). Compiled stuff adds many times unneeded complexity.

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.

The right balance is definitely not having log files as a binary format. We don't need use cases for log files. Log files should be plain text, plain simple, portable, accessible. journalctl is doing the exact opposite and not providing much benefit. Honestly Lennart, this is something that will make people start hating Fedora. Especially people who deal with crashes, recovery and support.

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

--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.

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