On 07/15/2013 01:23 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
But anyway, I'd still like to hear the technical reasoning for the opinion you expressed.
Because you are able to read txt file with *anything*. But you are not always able to read binary files. Because journalctl is not available.
Example from real life: Sometimes it happen to me, that I'm fixing totally borked computer. And I have available only what is in memory - because HDD with /usr crashed, but machine is still running (and /var is readable) and with vt open. (BTW - coincidently it happened to me just one month ago). If I want to read last messages, I could not start journactl, but I can read /var/log/messages with bash builtins.
And since I'm not always choosing which machine I'm going to fixing, I would prefer that /var/log/messages is present as text file as default.
If somebody explicitly want to remove rsyslog and live only with journalctl, then let it be. And I do not care about other logs, they can be in binary forms, if you want. But I want to have /var/log/messages available in pure text form.