| |||||||||||||
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacementThe Journal - a proposed syslog replacementPosted Nov 18, 2011 17:48 UTC (Fri) by dlazaro (subscriber, #38702)Parent article: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement
Please, Lennart, stop messing with the system. You are over-thinking and over-complicating everything. And your unneeded changed are arriving at my systems undocumented. Enough is enough.
(Log in to post comments)
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 17:52 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Undocumented? If you're talking about systemd, it is one of the better documented projects. If your distro isn't announcing the change, that's not something you can blame on Lennart.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 18:03 UTC (Fri) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] No, the binary format that the journald will use won't be documented. Read the google doc that describes the design and FAQ. Also, journald. It simply had to be a generic name, hadn't it?
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 18:25 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Ah, I got mixed up by the "are arriving" tense. I don't expect journald is anywhere other than their machines yet.
The undocumented format is annoying.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 18:38 UTC (Fri) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]
> The undocumented format is annoying.
My sense is that they are trying not to get trapped into backward compatibility games by having other programs that read/write the data without using the supplied library. I don't think they plan to deliberately obfuscate the format (and they will be providing code to both read and write it), but my guess is that they don't want to get stuck into a particular format forevermore because someone wrote a program that grabbed the 12th byte of every record and decided that some data would always appear there.
It's essentially the ABI problem that the kernel runs into, and that sometimes makes it difficult to change things in the kernel (like tracepoints for example).
jake
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 18:47 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
There still needs to be some backwards compatability mechanism because the tool will need to read logs in the older formats (at least, I sincerely hope so!). In that case, not documenting the format is silly. If the format isn't versioned, then the format is silly.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 21:29 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
The document states this is temporary. The feature isn't even in the main systemd code yet, but is on a separate branch. They're avoiding specifying a format until they're sure that it's nailed down, does what they need, doesn't have some unforseen problem that could only be found through widespread testing, etc.
Once it's a stable feature, expect the format to be documented. Until then, the documentation is available in the .c files for anyone who has some need to avoid the provided library interface.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 21:57 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> They're avoiding specifying a format until they're sure that it's nailed down, does what they need, doesn't have some unforseen problem that could only be found through widespread testing, etc.
This is understandable, even appreciated. Having multiple minor versions of varying usefulness indefinitely supported just because they existed for a commit or two during the inital format designs would be crazy to expect.
> Once it's a stable feature, expect the format to be documented.
FTA:
This is not a strong a guarantee as I'd like for this and certainly not something that would range a high level of expectancy from me. Before it becomes default in a major distribution, I'd like to see a format specification.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 18, 2011 18:32 UTC (Fri) by DiegoCG (subscriber, #9198) [Link]
Well, speak for you. I, for one, am happy to see innovation happen in the Linux land. Unix and Linux always were about inventing new things, not pretending that all the problems that old designs have can be completely dismissed forever.
People who hate change and want to keep things like they were several decades ago can always use the BSDs...
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 23, 2011 11:28 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>People who hate change and want to keep things like they were several decades ago can always use the BSDs...
Almost everyone dislikes user-visible change, unless there's a very slow migration path one step at a time (see KDE4, Vista, Gnome 3, etc.). Yes, this community has a larger proportion of heatseekers than the world at large, but even the FOSS world tends not to like huge revolutionary changes in one go.
More transparent changes - by which I mean things that don't change the way the user interacts with the machine on a daily basis - tend to be more welcome as there's less of a downside, so if it improves some functionality in some obvious way then it's an easier sell. For example, systemd has been far more positively received than PulseAudio since it solves real known problems without much of an effect on the end user.
Unfortunately, Lennart has a fairly bad track record. His projects tend to involve a grandiose scheme to replace some way of doing things entirely, which he then gets bored of once they reach the 90% stage.
Presumably some up-and-coming new star will come along again in a few years and decide to rewrite sound systems or init systems or syslog (or display servers, or desktop environments, or...), get them 90% done, and then get bored of them, and the cycle will begin anew.
Unfortunately, the options are either to stick with systems that are permanently 90% done, or be dismissed as a greybearded old has-been who 'hates change'.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 25, 2011 16:26 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> Unfortunately, Lennart has a fairly bad track record.
Well, Lennart always cared about having a working migration path. PulseAudio supports the old ESD protocol and features an ALSA plugin. Systemd supports traditional init scripts just fine, and the journal can be used via the traditional syslog(3) api. Also, I'd say that having someone like Lennart who has the guts to try to get rid of some established but broken/limited practise is an asset, not a liability.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 8:35 UTC (Sat) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
I fully agree.
It seems now that once per 3 months there is an announcement "Lennart replaces another core UNIX utility", so in the not too distant future we would have Linux boxes where I don't know a thing how they work, all the stuff we learnt over years thrown away for Linux, while it still works on other systems (...FreeBSD would be the choice then I guess).
Alex
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 23, 2011 11:14 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>It seems now that once per 3 months there is an announcement "Lennart replaces another core UNIX utility", so in the not too distant future we would have Linux boxes where I don't know a thing
ITYM 'Lennux boxes'.
|
|||||||||||||