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The Journal - a proposed syslog replacementThe Journal - a proposed syslog replacementPosted Nov 19, 2011 2:01 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)In reply to: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement by jmorris42 Parent article: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement
You know what? Nobody in the real world cares about the so-called "Unix philosophy". Rob Pike said it best: "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."
What people do care about is problems being solved, like the problems that Lennart documented in his proposal. And the thing that the self-proclaimed guardians of the "Unix philosophy" all have in common is that they don't solve problems but deny them, point to 20-year-old would-be solutions that are known to suck and blather about things such as "cultural heritage". That's why Lennart's projects keep being adopted by pretty much all major distros, despite "Unix philosophers" whining and bitching about it.
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The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 2:16 UTC (Sat) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]
Mr World, excuse me, are you a sysadmin?
The quoted journald document promises:
Frankly, these three issues nullify all other described advantages.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 2:55 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> breaking compatibility with existing standard and protocols, used not only by Linux systems, but by almost everything else,
Yeah, except that it doesn't. From said document: "Data can be generated from a variety of sources: [...], userspace messages generated with syslog(3)"
> coupling journald with systemd, thus making it non-portable, thus locking out non-Linux systems, all Linux systems not using systemd as an init replacement and most appliances,
> using *undocumented* binary format for storing compressed and possibly encrypted and/or signed data.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 3:40 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Why would one document a file format that isn't stable and may be changed in the future? Especially when you can just use the library to read it... We're talking about logs here. They could contain important information needed a long time after it is generated, possibly even for legal reasons. If you are given a court order to produce two-year-old logs and can no longer read your old logs because the file format has changed in the meantime... you will not be very happy (and neither will the court.) Indexing log files for performance is not a bad idea. Making them tamper-evident is a good idea too. But both of those can be done by adding to existing plain-text log file formats. You don't need to throw that out in favour of a binary format.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 20:59 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> We're talking about logs here. They could contain important information needed a long time after it is generated, possibly even for legal reasons. If you are given a court order to produce two-year-old logs and can no longer read your old logs because the file format has changed in the meantime...
I trust Lennart to develop a solution to this, should this case actually arise. There are two obvious solutions. One is to implement a conversion tool after a format change that will be maintained indefinitely (a tool that simply reads a log file and outputs it again in a new format is unlikely to require a lot of maintenance). Another one is to simply keep the code for reading pre-format-change log files in the library, so that everything just works even with newer tools as long as they use the library. Also, one should keep in mind that journald is a very young project. I'd guess they'll document the file format eventually when they're sure it does what they need it to do.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 21, 2011 14:40 UTC (Mon) by regala (subscriber, #15745) [Link]
> journald is a very young project. I'd guess they'll document the file format eventually when they're sure it does what they need it to do
given we're talking about Lennart and Kay, it will never do what they need it to do long enough to call it "stable format". ;)
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 7:43 UTC (Sat) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Being open source makes these problems all easily fixable:
- Anyone can add support for whatever "standard and protocol" he wants - Anyone can decouple it from systemd - Anyone can read the source and document the format
But Red Hat ought to hire a PR spokesman for Poettering, to stop him from making these unnecessarily divisive statements, since he could just say that they "haven't yet had the time" to do those things, rather than outright saying "HAHA NO!" to reasonable points like those.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 2:38 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> What people do care about is problems being solved, like the problems that Lennart documented in his proposal.
We also care that these solutions don't reintroduce other problems which we've spent quite a bit of effort over the years resolving. That's what the "UNIX philosophy" is really about--learning from our past mistakes.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 2:58 UTC (Sat) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
You are really taking that quote out of context.
Rob Pike created Plan9, which in tried to take UNIX to its logical conclusion. Plan9 tries to really make everything a file, including sockets. It uses the filesystem to control access to resources. And so on. The reason why UNIX "smell[ed] really bad" to Rob Pike is because Plan9 never caught on, because people didn't want to break compatibility. It really is a shame because Plan9 was the superior OS.
That being said, I am in favor of the proposal here-- at least in the context of server systems.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 12:25 UTC (Sat) by rilder (subscriber, #59804) [Link]
It is a philosophy, not an implementation. Read that again. It is like a specification. You can write a new tool tomorrow conforming to unix philosophy (and many have), and FYI Plan9 has adopted unix philosophy (actually its both way) and Rob Pike, who you are so fancifully quoting is a one of the main developers of Plan9. Go language from Google, is inspired by Plan9 semantics.
"That's why Lennart's projects keep being adopted by pretty much all major distros, despite "Unix philosophers" whining and bitching about it."
Yes, he is doing good work but don't jump the gun. Fedora (the home distro of systemd) is pretty shaky about fully adopting it. RHEL (where the money lies) is not even close. SUSE has delayed it. Ubuntu is going with upstart right ?
If you want to PR work, don't use LWN, use digg -- you will find plenty there who will buy your stuff.
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 14:37 UTC (Sat) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I see no "shakiness" in Fedora's uptake of systemd; quite the contrary, the conversion of legacy sysvinit scipts is comming along nicely. That a very conservative distribution like RHEL hasn't yet adopted systemd is no surprise, AFAIU RHEL 6 was forked off around Fedora 14, way before systemd was solid enough. Debian prefers playing with non-Linux kernels, so systemd is out for them. Ubuntu is home to upstart, so it in little surprise it will take time to win them over.
Again: you are trying to hard... Posted Nov 19, 2011 14:49 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] "That's why Lennart's projects keep being adopted by pretty much all major distros, despite "Unix philosophers" whining and bitching about it." This is funny. Systemd is not the first large Lennart's project. More like third (not counting minor ones). First two (avahi and pulseaudio) were met by similar comments as systemd yet now it's hard to find distribution which have not adopted them. And systemd adoption is in pretty good shape if you'll recall that it's pretty young project still.
Again: you are trying to hard... Posted Nov 21, 2011 7:01 UTC (Mon) by yoe (subscriber, #25743) [Link]
Pulseaudio is crap. It hides the devices that ALSA exports for little purpose, and IME introduces more problems than it tries to solve.
Avahi is interesting in theory; but when I try to say "ping celtic.local" on my home network, there's about a 50-50 chance that it'll find what the right IP address is.
I'm not using systemd, and won't change to it, either. Enabling or disabling a sysv init scripts requires moving about a few symlinks. What more does one need?
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