On Mon, 15.07.13 15:28, Eric Smith (brouhaha@fedoraproject.org) wrote:
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Lennart Poettering mzerqung@0pointer.de wrote:
(But really, the comparison is just wrong, since the registry is a configuration store, and not a log store.)
It's not a perfect analogy, yet the arguments for both seem very similar, which is why I brought it up. We should try to learn from the mistakes made by other systems, rather than rushing to repeat them.
Microsoft uses binary logs also, and they are really awful. Maybe your binary journal is far better than MS' logs, but all the arguments I've seen for it so far make it seem like the advantages are mainly for complex use cases, and for those someone is going to do a bunch of system configuration work anyhow, so it doesn't make sense for that to be the default. The default should be simple, and the configuration should be done if you want something complex, rather than the other way around.
Showing the last 10 log lines for "systemctl status" is not a "complex usecase". Quite frankly, seeing the most recent log output of a service is certainly the most relevant information when you are wondering about a service's state. There is no efficient, correct way how you could implement that on top of /var/log/messages.
journalctl makes things easier, not more complex. Sure, you have to learn a new tool, but the level is low for this one, and you will gain a lot more out of it.
Lennart