The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement

> 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.