On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Lennart Poettering mzerqung@0pointer.de 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.
I have thought a lot about usecases, and it's exactly because I have to maintain other people's systems that use the default installation, and I routinely have to use more, less, cat, grep, vi, etc. on /var/log/messages that I don't want to see it go away. It's far easier for me to tell someone a grep command on the phone than to also have to tell them to run some other tool and pipe the input into grep, or into a temp file that I can have them look at in an editor. /var/log/messages is there, it works, and it is BETTER than a binary format even if it doesn't contain as much information.
Eric