On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 02:46:27PM -0600, Eric Smith wrote:

I don't actually care whether there's a binary journal or not, but far
more of us have real usecases for /var/log/messages, so we shouldn't
give up that being available by default.

If you use bash or ksh you could just replace /var/log/messages with
<(journalctl) in your command line and stuff should just work (when
reading). Other shells can probably do the same. It obviously depends on
journalctl being able to run.