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The Journal - a proposed syslog replacementThe Journal - a proposed syslog replacementPosted Nov 19, 2011 9:38 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141)In reply to: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement by gmaxwell Parent article: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement
Well, it is a well-understood worry at least.
Log files have a long life, potentially in order of decades, so that sets the level of backwards compatibility required. It is huge, and indicates that whatever the merits of not documenting the format, it will become set in stone anyway unless log conversion tools are provided which can perform the conversion and afterwards validate that every bit of the information is old version was preserved and correctly converted (which might be same as checking the hash value of the log entries).
Nevertheless, even if archived logs become unreadable, old versions of this software do not just vanish into the ether but remain runnable, at the limit through emulation of x86 instruction set and old linux kernel versions. So some solution will always exist.
Regardless, I'd say that the reasonable requirement is that every generated journald log file must remain readable forever, or a chain of provably non-lossy converters must be provided that can upgrade from the earliest version.
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The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 16:59 UTC (Sat) by backslash (subscriber, #32022) [Link] Nevertheless, even if archived logs become unreadable, old versions of this software do not just vanish into the ether but remain runnable, at the limit through emulation of x86 instruction set and old linux kernel versions. So some solution will always exist. This is all open source and not binary only apple or windows.... Just recompile!!
The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement Posted Nov 19, 2011 18:28 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Obviously you have not tried to recompile old software. There tends to be a significant porting effort because changes in build system (autotools, I hate you) and compiler code purity requirements may cause code to not compile anymore, or might segfault despite compiling. Additionally, any dependencies to libraries make things that much worse, because not only must that software compile but the old versions of the libraries must compile also.
Emulation at binary level through technique such as virtualization may therefore be far easier to achieve.
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